by Richard Hein
The door to the warehouse was gone. It had been ripped clean of the reinforced frame, left crumpled on the concrete like a wad of used tissue. The steel of the building itself had been peeled away, metal fingers bowed outward toward the array of cars. Within, lights flickered, burning the scene into my memory like a broken slide projector. Bodies lay strewn everywhere, as broken and mangled as those on the rooftop of the dilapidated apartment I’d just left. They were unrecognizable. Blood painted everything in a sticky, macabre decor. How many people had rallied an ineffective defense? There was no way to tell. It hadn’t been a battle. Slaughter wouldn’t even work for a description. It was perverse.
I stared, unable to tear my eyes away. How many had I known? Was Alissa in there somewhere, my partner in my decade of work? She’d joined shortly after I had. How many others had been unable to stand against the Archangel?
“Samuel.”
My eyes came up, lids heavy. I didn’t even feel sick. Just the pressure of my anger hammering at my veins, begging for release. The kid was wide-eyed, looking so young, soaking in the carnage. It would be seared into him, and indelible mark on his soul, clawing at his nightmares and bubbling up in the recesses of his mind when it was quiet. I knew. My fingers curled around his shirt as I yanked him close, ripping him free of his trance. For whatever little it was worth, he wasn’t an intern any more.
“We have to go, Daniel,” I said. I pulled him across the sticky floor. He stumbled once, following along like a numb puppy, legs moving only by muscle memory. I paused long enough to snatch up a baton from the floor, one that hadn’t been completely coated in the remains of someone I might have once called friend. I didn’t bother with a gun.
It wouldn’t mean shit.
“God,” Daniel said, voice cracking. “I mean… God.”
“Has nothing to do with this,” I snarled. The portal to Sanctuary lay open. Dark stains splashed against the frame, runners like vile fingers of graffiti dripping toward the concrete floor. “There is only us now. We have to get in there and find whoever is left alive. Christina. Anyone.” I swallowed, a momentary quiver of something caressing at the fire that had stoked to an inferno within me. “Kate. I have to find Kate.”
“This is Michael. An Archangel. Oh, God. An Archangel, Samuel. That’s like a class ten Entity. The OFC has never—”
“I don’t have a choice.” My wrist flicked out the baton. It felt good to hold a weapon, even one that would be as ineffective as a summer’s breeze against an elemental force like Michael. “This is my fault, Daniel. You want to leave? Fine.” I looked at the portal to another universe. Was Kate even still alive? Michael would have no use for her once it got to The Boss, but she was across the plaza and two floors down. Michael wouldn’t know where that was, and it seemed the Entity was taking time to slaughter everyone on the way. There was a chance.
I didn’t wait for a reply from Daniel as I stepped out of the universe.
Chapter 16
Hope that the Seneschals of the OFC had mounted a defense and driven the intruders from Sanctuary turned bitter in my mouth as the twisted fountain came into view. The din of battle still carried to the endless night, but it was clearly a one-sided war, a handful of humans against the angelic hosts. Flames licked at the bent structures that lined the plaza, some sections cut cleanly away by the power that the defenders had brought to bear. For a heartbeat, my steps slowed. The only place I’d ever truly cared about, the only place where I’d ever felt right about my place in the order of things… My home burned.
“Ah, hell,” I whispered. “Mikey brought friends.”
“Uh, what?”
Forms in white robes went about their slaughter with precision. A burst of violet light seared out from a group of defenders, striking one of the extra-dimensional attackers in the gut and battering it away into a building. Above, one of the singing crystals pulsed brighter for a breath. The creature twisted, planting feet against the wall and leapt off. Wood fractured beneath it. Golden light flared about its shoulders as the EDE swept high into the night. Two more purple beams swept toward it, but the androgynous figure twisted and dove between them. Its sword shimmered into being as it struck, blade slamming forward through the hapless young man and into the stone of the ground. It spun and knocked two other defenders away with a contemptuous flick of its foot.
“There’s a host of angels,” I said. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the frenzy of the battle.
“A host?”
“A flock a seagulls. A gaggle of geese. A host of angels.”
Daniel started hyperventilating.
“It delayed Michael, taking the time to give them all personal invites into Sanctuary.”
“We had enough problems with the two at Kate’s brother’s house,” he said morosely. “I’m an intern, and you’re a has-been. No offense.”
“Oh, plenty taken,” I said with far more enthusiasm than I felt, getting a feel for the flow of battle, trying to find an opening. I could see more defenders behind the rubble of a building or firing from open windows, but the lay of the fight was evident by the scattered bodies and the swarming number of figures in white robes.
We were losing.
“Come on,” I urged, hunkering low and slipping around the back of a building. Daniel followed mercifully without a sound. We dipped into the shadows and toward a building at the edge of the plaza.
“We can’t just leave them,” Daniel whispered. “Samuel, we can’t abandon them to—”
“To die?” I asked. I was surprised at how calm my voice sounded despite the tempest within me. Something pressed against the inferno from the outside, something cool and rational, but I flicked it away with a mental snarl. “You want to join them, Daniel? Be my guest. It’s a slaughter. We need something stronger if we’re going to have a chance against them, let alone Michael. The standard gear is too weak. We need the big guns from the armory.”
I held up a hand and paused at the edge of the plaza. I could just see the main building. Where the barracks were. The library. Where Michael would be with Kate. We’d be exposed, but I hoped that everyone’s attention was too engaged to notice. I took a step, hesitated, and turned to face Daniel.
“Everything in me is telling me to go after Kate,” I said, my tone softening. “To help who we can. I want to, Daniel. I do. We’d be throwing our lives away if we did, and Michael would have this place. It’s the hard decision, but we have to be smart about this. I learned this with Lauren. These batons will do about as much good as throwing packing peanuts against Michael.”
“I agree,” Daniel said. His voice was tired. “I don’t have to like it, but I do agree with you. It’s just—”
I clapped him on the shoulder. “Yeah.”
The sounds of fighting dwindled. The growing quiet wrenched at my heart. It took everything I had not to turn and throw my defiance at the invaders, but my feet carried me on along the twisting path. My lungs burned as I took great, ragged breaths, vowing with each one to burn them to ash for what they’d done here today. They’d left Sanctuary an empty shell, devoid of the people that had once called it home like I had. Most I hadn’t called friends, but they were still brothers and sisters, even after they’d turned away from me for what I’d done. If I didn’t stop them, Michael would be lord of a tomb.
I almost stumbled. What if this was their tomb? The OFC as an organization had been around a lot longer than Sanctuary. It could move. People could live. I tucked away my Plan B idea in the back of my mind behind my useless X-Files trivia. It might work, in the same way that high diving into a kiddie pool might not leave you paralyzed, but it was better than some alternatives we were facing.
We stopped in front of the weapon repository at the corner of the plaza, in easy reach of those leaving the main buildings. It had been built of some seriously thick slabs of steel, with a door not unlike the one that had graced the warehouse we’d come in through. Of course, that door hadn’t fared well during an angelic invasio
n. Inside would be all the weapons we used to fight the hordes that clawed in the darkness, from batons on up to those goofy brass and glass canons. I was hoping on more. All sorts of weapons, crafted by the Entity that held the tide-pool of a reality we inhabited together. Little nuggets of its consciousness used to power weapons. I’d never seen them used within Sanctuary before, but it explained why the ring of crystals in the night sky above kept flaring in brilliance.
Had kept flaring. They’d dwindled back to their normal beautiful silence once more.
I bent to peer at the lock, but Daniel grabbed my arm and yanked me around. “Samuel,” he whispered. Fingers tightened on my jacket. I saw what he was staring at and swore.
Blood. An awful lot of it, without the bodies it should have gone with. I hadn’t been the only one with the bright idea to load up on the good stuff.
“Help me get this lock open,” I whispered. My voice sounded like a badly dubbed cartoon to my own ears as I backed up against the steel of the building, my eyes trying to look at all the buildings at once. “We have a universe to save.”
“You are in err, Samuel Walker,” a wonderful voice said from above. My heart twisted at the beautiful song in its words. “This cancer, this disease, will be purged, and all those who support it shall be struck clean from the whole of the body.”
“Is my name in some sort of interdimensional phone book?” I muttered. Everyone always seemed to know who I was.
We backpedaled as a man of unparalleled beauty jumped from the top of the storage warehouse. Daniel dragged me away. A golden nimbus of light erupted from its back, slowing its descent. The Entity fell as if cradled by a gentle hand, unblemished and impossibly white robes whispering as it landed. A vague aura of gold and white swirled about its head as entirely black eyes flecked with silver regarded me without remorse. Despite the volcano that erupted within me, my heart froze as I beheld it. My joints even ached under that gaze. Its graceful hand twitched, and a thousand twinkling stars coalesced into a blade, like a tiny galaxy held firm in the shape of a sword. Daniel drew in a sharp breath.
“Disease?” I snorted. “The OFC has been keeping the Earth safe for thousands of years. Surely you know what’s out there, waiting to sink its teeth in like humanity was an all you can eat buffet. Find a stick for a measuring rod and do the math on that one, prick.”
Daniel groaned. “Don’t antagonize the angel, Samuel.”
The blade sang as it moved, a chorus of distant voices tugging at my mind as the angel swept the point toward me. “Perhaps.”
“That’s it?” I shouted. “That’s your wisdom? That’s the reason you’re exorcising our one defense against things like you?”
The angel advanced. “It is the will of…”
I’d stopped listening. I didn’t give myself over to the rage. It wasn’t a matter of letting it off the leash, or unblocking it from within me. I accepted that it was a part of me, as much as breathing. It suffused me, soaking through my being, unending fury at the last three years of my life. Lauren had thought that there might have been good Entities out there. I was staring down what passed for a literal angel, something believed in as a guardian of right and good by billions, and they were here to exterminate humanity’s hope against the darkness. Lauren had been wrong.
Fuck Entities.
My footfalls echoed as I charged. The time for regrets had passed. I’d waffled between retirement and wishing I could return to this world for too long, and it had stunted my ability to protect myself. To protect Kate. My eyes had been blinded to what had been right in front of me.
I laughed as the angel’s black and silver eyes widened. It had never expected a guy in a shredded t-shirt and a five day growth of beard to charge it, waving a stick and howling. To be fair, neither did I, but our mutual surprise worked in my favor. My veins hummed as I engaged the creature, the monster that wore the mask of goodness. The angel swept up its blade as I whipped the baton down at its too-perfect face, and we crashed together. I wasn’t trying to fence it. This wasn’t a sword fight. I was going to straight out murder the thing.
“It’s not an angel, Daniel,” I yelled, hoping to bolster the intern. My body thrummed like someone had hooked me up to the world’s largest amp and hit the perfect power chord. The anger within stoked the fires of my engine as I grabbed a handful of pristine robes and hauled the thing in close so I could batter its face around a bit. “It’s not a creature of light, the answer to prayers, or a baby-faced cherub that pisses into fountains.”
The blade whipped through the air, its song battering at my rage. I swore and tossed myself to the side. White fire scored along my hip. I rolled and came up onto shaky feet. It had only been a nick, but the wound burned without bleeding, a cut just below my belt on my left side. The blade had parted cloth and flesh like air, as well as some of the warehouse on the follow through. I swallowed. It did give me an idea, though.
I just had to piss off an angel.
“It’s just another thing that lives beyond our world and preys on us, Daniel,” I said, snapping up the baton again. “You’ve faced worse before. They’ve chosen a pretty form to make it easier to deal with, but they are as black on the inside as the rest of them. Destroying these cockroaches is your job.”
“This is for humanity’s sake, Samuel Walker,” the creature said. It regarded me with sadness. “You can not see all paths. If Sanctuary is allowed to persist, calamity will come to—”
“I’ve listened to enough of your kind,” I said as I charged.
The angel flung itself backward, a graceful backflip a dozen feet into the air. Bare feet planted on the vertical surface of the steel of the warehouse. Its robes hung in defiance, as if gravity had kindly altered for it toward the shed’s wall. I gaped. Well, that was useful in a fight. It hunkered down for a moment, a spring coiling for action, and then exploded down toward me. I had enough time to get a two-handed grip on the baton as the radiant missile flashed through the air at me, blade extended. I needed to get this right. Timing was everything. A dodge, a twist, and let its blade shear through the lock and…
Daniel’s tackle caught the thing in midair. They twisted and rolled across the granite walkway. Daniel’s arm hammered the entire time, pummeling the beautiful face with his baton. A haze of black fuzz filled the air. I followed, throwing myself at the tangled mass of limbs with a roar and my best professional wrestling impression. My baton connected against its neck. I grinned. Its foot whipped out from beneath Daniel with supernatural speed, caught me in the stomach, and launched me back in a parabolic arc. I had enough grace to tumble once before I impacted one of the twisted lamp posts upside down, clipped off of it, and rolled a few more feet.
The angel shuddered and exploded in a flash of black static.
My head slumped against cold stone. “Well, that works too.”
My beating had been the perfect distraction. The kid had been in contact with the creature for long enough to exert his will and send it home. Daniel grunted as he fell through the space the creature had just vacated. I was content to lay there, listening to the music of agony across my body, and gave him a thumbs up. I had to hand it to him. The Entity likely had more power than the granny I’d fought, and he sent it home handily.
The intern gave me a weak thumbs up back.
“You know, if my mother finds out I exorcised an angel, she’ll disown me,” he said.
It hurt to laugh, but I did anyway. There were a number of groans as we rolled to our feet and gathered our feeble weapons, but we’d done it. I gave him a pat on the back. Daniel winced.
“One down,” I said. I limped back to the undamaged lock. “Who knows how many more to go. Lather. Rinse. Repeat.”
Daniel said nothing, but his face had lost some of the youthful exuberance I’d always known there. He stared ahead with dull regret. It was a look I knew all too well, and we hadn’t even done anything of note yet.
The baton came up. I hesitated and glanced over my shoulder. The pl
aza was lifeless. I could see no signs of the battle. No angels, no people, just the star-lit background behind the worse-for-wear buildings.
“That will not be necessary.”
Christina stood a few yards away. Beside her loomed Francis, holding in his hands what looked to me like a Victorian era Super Soaker. Kseniya stood behind the two, one hand pressed to her side, a vicious red line visible that wept no blood. I blew out a breath. Michael hadn’t found her yet, which meant there was a good chance Kate was alive.
“Francis, this is honestly the first time I can say I’m overjoyed to see you,” I said.
“I would never say the same about you, no matter how dire the circumstances,” Francis said, though he inclined his head as he pressed his back against the warehouse. Kseniya slumped to the ground nearby with a weak groan, and Daniel all but pounced onto her, checking the wound. Christina’s eyes met mine.
“Well, you stepped in it this time, didn’t you?” she asked, ageless face without emotion. “This has your name scrawled all over it.”
Kseniya pushed the intern away. “What did you do, Samuel?” she whispered. “God damn it, what did you do this time?”
I backed up a step, unable to meet the accusations in their eyes. “I was trying to help,” I said. The bubble of anger twitched and rippled as Francis shuffled toward me. “It was an accident. Michael twisted my words.”
The wounded Kseniya was on her feet and slamming me against the steel building before I could blink. Pain battered at my skull as the muscular woman bounced me off of the building like a volleyball off my skull. I’d hated Dodgeball in grade school, and wasn’t liking it any more now.
“You ass!” she screamed into my face. “Lauren was like a sister to me. We should have killed you for what you did to her. Everyone is dead because of you.”
Francis pulled her off of me. “I didn’t know!” I shouted. “He played all of us. We need to get the survivors together, hope his precognition doesn’t work outside of Earth, and kick his ass back—”
