Dark Angel's Ward

by Nia Shay

  I applied more pressure to his throat, smiling in grim satisfaction as his eyes bulged in their sockets. Some part of me yearned to drain him, to suck every bit of life from his body and leave nothing but a withered husk. But I didn't want to take his corrupt soul into mine.

  Instead, I followed Zeph's example, pushing power outward. I'd never done it before, but the knowledge was there inside my mind and I didn't question it. Briggs stiffened violently as azoth poured into his body. He began to seize, nearly jerking free of my grasp.

  I squeezed even harder. "Die," I whispered. The single word echoed, playing accompaniment to Briggs's gurgling yowl.

  Soon, small wisps of smoke began to rise from the man's skin and hair. I dropped him, fearing he burst into flames entirely. I'd done my work well enough, anyway. He gasped and convulsed for less than a minute before he died. I drew back a foot and kicked the corpse away, propelling it across the room to crumple beside the door.

  Zeph stirred weakly at my feet. I looked down to find him gazing up at me, his dark eyes wide and reverent. "Jandra."

  I smiled, bending to lift him up off the floor. It took a little effort to balance his lanky frame in my arms, but his weight didn't trouble me at all. I arranged him carefully on my table, since it was the cleaner of the two. "There is one more," I told him, my new voice as somber as a requiem.

  He closed his eyes and nodded. "Markus."

  "He cannot be allowed to live."

  "I know. I...." His words broke off into a gasp and a spate of racking coughs. Blood bubbled at the corners of his mouth.

  In my heart I wept for him, wailed at the injustice. But fairness and sentiment are human concepts, and my mind was no longer entirely human. I watched with a sort of horrified fascination as my hand skimmed the air above his ruined abdomen, as if taking the measure his wounds.

  Then I turned and walked away. The sounds of his labored breathing echoed in my ears, but it wasn't enough to sway my steps. Apparently neither layer of my altered consciousness had any desire to watch him die.

  The sensation of being led by invisible strings slowly diminished as I neared the door. My heart and mind were united on the subject of Father Markus, at least. I would find him. I would kill him. And then I'd come back for Zeph, otherworldly compulsions be damned.

  An acrid stench assaulted my nose as I reached the heavy steel door. I looked down on Briggs's remains. His bowels had let go, of course, but that wasn't the source of this smell. I nudged the corpse with my foot, causing his head to loll. Two thin streams of blood had oozed from his nostrils, the fluid thick and dark against the waxy pallor of his skin. It seemed to be smoking faintly.

  Frowning, I reached down and lifted the body by its shirt collar. The strange, bitter odor nearly overwhelmed me at close range. Another rivulet of the bloody sludge trickled from Briggs's left ear. The short hairs of his sideburn had shriveled away where the stuff had touched them. As if it weren't blood at all, but some sort of corrosive chemical. How...odd.

  I didn't have long to puzzle over it--the sounds of furtive motion in the hallway distracted me. I smiled blandly at the scuffling. Briggs's cries seemed to have made his comrades wary. I switched my grip on his collar, holding his limp weight in front of me like a shield as the door creaked open.

  A rush of exhaled breath preceded a masculine voice. "Mein Herr...?" A strangled gasp followed as the guard got a good look at his commander's condition.

  I hurled Briggs's body at the man. He fell backward with a surprised grunt, then began to scream shrilly. He flailed and flopped, but the corpse's dead weight seemed to roll in perfect time with his spastic motion, keeping him pinned to the ground. I stepped over them, out into the hall. Soldier Boy hadn't even brought any backup. Idiot.

  "Bleiben Sie dort." The carillon voice spoke for me, spouting words I could only assume were in German. Soldier Boy went still at the sound and looked up at me, white-faced and whimpering. "Alarmieren Sie keinen," I added.

  "Nein, nein, ich nicht!" the young man gabbled. "Verletzen Sie mich bitte nicht!"

  "Fear not," I replied as I drifted past him, wondering what the hell else I'd said.

  Thirty

  The hallway looked exactly as I'd dreamed it would. I noted that as ironic, but basically didn't give a damn. The part of me that was still Jandra was also still too furious at Brax to find much value in his so-called help. And the part of me that had become vengeance personified seemed to know the way. I headed to the right without hesitation.

  Also true to prediction, I met only a handful of other people in the corridors. Presumably the news of my breakout had already spread. If the guards were as limited as he'd suggested, they'd probably marshaled their forces at the exits. Little did they know I couldn't care less about the exits in my current state of mind. What I sought would be deep in the belly of the beast.

  The few I did encounter must have been the mad scientists--none of them seemed to be armed, anyway. None of them gave me any trouble, either. One glance from my smoldering eyes convinced them to make way. One man, who'd been carrying a tray laden with instruments, dropped his burden at the sight of me and ran screaming in the other direction.

  As I stood studying the array of scattered tools, it occurred to me all of these people must know who I was--or more importantly, what I was. Something I didn't even know myself anymore. The very notion sent my thoughts scrambling around my brain like terrified mice.

  But my body suffered no such signs of reaction. I knelt, my hand extending of its own accord to sort through the equipment at my feet. I snatched up a piece of glass and raised it to eye level, studying its curved shape and regular markings. A piece of a broken syringe. A single undamaged one lay amongst the shards of several others. I picked up the whole one next. A wicked-looking steel needle jutted from one end.

  I transferred the syringe to my left hand as I continued to sift through the mess with my right. Nothing else looked useful. No scalpels, or anything else sharp enough to use as a weapon. Most of the items were chemical vials. Some had broken and spilled their contents, but a few were still intact. I recognized the names of some--diazepam, ketamine, propofol. All drugs with a sedative effect. Perhaps a quick tranq was standard treatment protocol for rampaging dark angels.

  My fingers closed around a vial labeled heparin. I had no idea what the drug did, but apparently the driving force within me knew. With smooth precision I raised the vial and stabbed my needle through its seal, filling the syringe with the clear fluid. I dropped the empty vial back into the midst of the mess and stood, slipping the loaded syringe into my sleeve.

  I resumed my trek at a steady pace, neither hurrying nor hesitating, however much I'd have liked to do either. The lab was a maze of intersecting passages, all disturbingly identical--white walls, steel doors, no escape. The confines of the place bothered me on a visceral level. When I began to hear the murmur of voices in my head again, it was almost comforting, an oddly normal occurrence. Besides, I took it as a good sign that Zeph was still holding onto life, still connected to me.

  Just as I'd once heard Cara's voice rise from the collective murmurings, another now stood out against the rest. A man's voice, deep and vaguely familiar, grew louder and clearer as I moved onward. I understood now what Zeph had meant that first night at the mall, when told me he'd found me by following the beating of my heart. It was like a game of Hot and Cold, though I never seemed to take a wrong turn. I wasn't listening to anything so innocent as a heartbeat, either. What I heard was Markus, murmuring prayers of penance.

  I found him at last behind a set of double doors marked with a simple painted cross. They opened into a small, dimly lit chapel, just the type one would find in a normal hospital. No desperate family members prayed for their loved ones here, though. Markus knelt alone before the altar amidst a smattering of candle flames.

  "How ironic that I find you here," I said as the doors swished shut behind me.

  He flinched visibly at the music of my voice, risin
g to his feet and turned to face me. His glasses looked opaque in the low light. "So you have succumbed to the Divine Will after all."

  I glided a few more steps down the aisle before replying, "Sometimes the path of fate must be walked voluntarily." Whatever the hell that meant. I certainly hadn't volunteered for any of this.

  Markus didn't appear to like my answer either. His face mottled red with fury. "There is no fate!" he shouted, pounding a fist against the nearest pew. "The Lord promised us free will!"

  "And so you have it," I said, outwardly unfazed by his anger. "You have chosen your every action up to this point, have you not?"

  "I did what I had to do!"

  Those words again--a pathetic justification for kidnapping and murder. Neither I nor the Divine Will, as he had dubbed it, were impressed. "Look upon what you have wrought, Markus," I said quietly.

  "You don't sit in judgment over me," he spat.

  "Perhaps not, but I come at the will of he who does. As you well knew I would."

  He responded with a wordless snarl. It seemed talking wouldn't get me anywhere with him. But neither was I intent on violence, not yet anyway. The killing strength that had allowed me to best Briggs had long since burnt out.

  My slow progress brought me to the front of the chapel, almost toe-to-toe with him. "Look." I gazed up at him. "Open your eyes and see. Compulsion threaded my words, though I didn't realize it until he went stock-still. He glared, but made no move to repel me. After a long moment I reached up and caught hold of the wire bow of his glasses. "Look."

  He made a small noise as I pulled the glasses from his face, as if the sparse flicker of the candlelight hurt his eyes. And perhaps it had. The whites were so jaundiced and bloodshot they barely looked real. Whatever color they'd once been had faded away--his irises shone a dull red, like an albino's. The glow from my own eyes reflected back as a sickly yellow-green.

  Despite the human face, I knew I looked into the eyes of a monster. Mentally, I flinched, but physically I remained as steady as before. It wasn't just the Divine Will's influence overriding my panic this time, either. Part of me had known all along the dark glasses were just for show.

  "Why do you hide behind these?" I asked, folding them shut. I moved past him toward the altar to lay them aside. "Are you not proud of what you've become?"

  "You don't understand," he ground out. "You couldn't possibly."

  "No, indeed." My hand reached unerringly over the candles in their jars to pick up an object hidden behind them--another glass syringe like the one hidden in my sleeve, except its plunger had been pushed in. As I pulled back on it, a familiar stench assaulted my nostrils. "A man of God who fills his veins with the blood of demons," I remarked. "Truly incomprehensible."

  Markus made a harsh sound that could have been either a laugh or a gasp. With my back turned to him, I couldn't tell. "Do you think I wanted things to happen this way?" he asked, his tone edged with hysteria.

  "I think you have lusted for power not given you." I replied, replacing the empty syringe in its hiding place as I spoke. I slipped the loaded one into my hand instead. With the plungers now in the same position and the transparent fluid invisible in the low light, they would appear identical at a glance. "I think you despise yourself for being merely human."

  "Humans are born flawed," he retorted.

  "So you covet perfection?"

  "I need it! I'm not strong enough without it."

  From the shaky desperation in his voice, I couldn't be sure if he meant he needed perfection, or his awful injections. I'd bet on the latter, though. He sounded just like a junkie, justifying his addiction with all the usual clichés. "You are a fool, Jonathan Markus," I said scornfully.

  I turned to face him at last, making no attempt to conceal the syringe in my hand. He made no effort to hide the gun in his, either. I felt vaguely surprised he'd managed to draw a weapon despite the compulsion I'd placed on him. Though I suppose I'd only commanded him to look.

  I couldn't bring myself to be any more concerned about this weapon than I'd been about Briggs's. I advanced on Markus again, my arms held loosely at my sides. "Greed," I accused as I walked. "Envy. Wrath. Pride."

  The gun wavered in his grip. "I've received absolution for all those things."

  "You mistake guilt for penitence."

  "No! I am forgiven!"

  I laughed hollowly. "If that is true, why do you cower before me? What is it you fear?"

  "Nothing!" My words seemed to strike a nerve. His spine straightened, and his arm steadied. "I merely hesitate to destroy a near-perfect specimen, that's all. I am truly disappointed in you, Ms. Maxwell."

  That was the first time he'd addressed me by name, and he did so now in an odd tone, as if he wasn't quite sure whether or not I'd hear him--as if he understood this strange duality I was experiencing. A disturbing thought indeed. Whatever whispered in his ear had to be pretty damned scary.

  But the Divine Will didn't care about any of that. "You cannot destroy me." The words were a sharp peal, rattling the stained glass panes in their frames. "I am the will and the voice of the Host."

  He raised an eyebrow. "Perhaps not, but I can certainly destroy that body you inhabit. After all, I created it."

  "Liar!" A surge of fury flared through me with my shout, a feeling I didn't fully understand. No, I wasn't too happy to think I owed my existence to someone's science experiment, but I hadn't fully accepted that as truth yet, either.

  This feeling transcended all uncertainty. It was the rage of the victim, the self-righteousness of the violated. It made my heart thunder in my chest like a trapped animal hurling itself against the bars of it cage. Adrenaline burned in my veins and the light of my eyes flared again, obscuring my vision with its intensity.

  My lunge came a moment too late. The gun coughed out a bullet, and a line of fire blazed across my right shoulder. It hurt like hell, but the pain brought a wild grin to my lips. My momentum carried me forward unchecked, and I drove the wounded joint into Markus's upper stomach.

  He lost his grip on the gun as he doubled over, gasping for breath. Before he could straighten, I wrapped an arm around his neck, swinging onto his back like a monkey. With my free hand I struck, burying the hypodermic in the side of his neck and pressing the plunger home.

  He froze in mid-thrash, gasping as the chemical poured into his bloodstream. "You can't think you've killed me so easily." He let out a hoarse, unearthly laugh. "I'm impervious to any poison you could possibly have scrounged up."

  "Not poison," I told him, "anticoagulant. Working in tandem with the blood thinners you ingest to force the demon sludge through your veins."

  "Hm." He casually raised an arm to eye level. Needle marks riddled the fold of his elbow, a few of the fresher ones oozing thin streams of smoking black goo. "Interesting," he said.

  "Indeed." I jerked upward on the syringe I still held. It seemed a small gesture from my end, but with the preternatural strength suffusing me, it tore a sizable hole in his carotid. Blood jetted across the altar. He choked, grasping at his throat.

  I slid off of him and stepped back. "This is what you have traded your soul for." I gestured to the mess. "How easily it drains away."

  "Damn...you!" he wheezed. I didn't bother to comment on the irony.

  He turned on me, having pulled the needle loose and covered the wound with his hand. It didn't matter--blood fountained between his fingers with rhythmic regularity. I moved aside to avoid being splattered. "You think you've won?" He cackled again, jabbing a shuddering finger at me. "This body is of no more value to me than that one is to you. Our eyes are everywhere, and our work will carry on!"

  I nodded soberly. "For a while, perhaps. Not forever."

  He gave no response, save to crumple to his knees. His blood pressure had to be in the basement by now. It didn't surprise me when he pitched forward onto all fours in the spreading pool of blackish blood. But I gasped when he looked up again, turning deep brown eyes on me.

  I f
ell back a step, my own will overriding the Divine's for that single moment. He gazed at me with those suddenly human eyes, looking confused and utterly terrified. As if whatever dark entity warped his soul had fled abruptly, abandoning the man to his fate.

  I watched, dumbfounded, as he crawled toward the altar and tugged down the red fabric runner that covered it, sending candles flying to gutter out on the floor. He wadded the fabric in his hands and jammed it against the hole in his throat.

  "Your fate has been sealed." The words bubbled from my lips, musical and sweet. I moved toward him--one step, two, graceful as a dancer--snatched the cloth from his trembling hands, and tossed it aside. Then I stood over him, outwardly impassive, as the gouts of blood became trickles, then a mere rivulet. I had no doubt if he'd tried again to staunch the bleeding, I'd be compelled to stop him again.

  But he didn't. He crumpled onto his side, his breath rattling ominously in his chest. He'd draw his last any second now. The whole thing had taken less than five minutes.

  "We do not fight to lose."

  This time the bell-like voice came not from my mouth, but echoing from the very air around me. Gasping, I stumbled backward, my feet slipping on the gore-soaked floor. I dropped into the first pew with a jarring thump.

  "Fear not." The words were familiar, as was the voice, more or less. Since it no longer issued from my throat, it didn't sound much like me anymore. "You have acquitted yourself well, Jandra Maxwell. Your father's blood runs strong in you."

  "Wha--what?" I stammered. My throat felt too tight to say much more. A thousand questions crowded on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn't sort them out quickly enough to pose one out loud. Especially not to the blank chapel wall before me.

  "Do not trouble yourself with what has transpired," the angelic voice continued.

  "What!" This time I shrieked the word. This supernatural puppet master had forced me away from Zeph's side and used me to kill two people--however deserving they'd been--and I was just supposed to forget it all?

  There came a soft tinkling noise, like a sullen breeze sighing through wind chimes. "Your soul is truly fractured."