Knight's Fall

by Angela Henry

  I crouched down and pulled my books from the shelf, but there was a problem. There were only four books, not five. My last book, the one I was using before I got clipped, was missing. Then I remembered it had been a fairly new book. I’d only been about forty years into it before I’d gotten kicked out. Did they store partially filled books somewhere else, or had they burnt my last book on the same pyre they’d burnt my wings? I looked behind the shelf to make sure it hadn’t fallen on the floor, but I knew it wouldn’t be there. I didn’t have time to look anyplace else. I’d come all this way and risked Marius’s life for nothing. Just to be sure I wasn’t mistaken, I untied the red cords of each of my other old books, looked inside, and discovered I couldn’t read the angelic script. It was just a bunch of golden scribbles and squiggles. Then I noticed Marius’s uniform had gotten tighter, and I’d grown a couple of inches. The effects of the angel blood were just about gone. It was getting harder to retain my current form.

  The sound of voices alerted me to the arrival of Alexi and the two seraph guards. They were questioning the cherub washing the windows, who pointed a finger in my direction. So he’d seen me after all. I looked around wildly for a place to hide. The elevator was the only way out of the storage rooms.

  “A little help would be nice,” I whispered to Raguel’s tapestry. And to my astonishment, the tapestry fluttered slightly, as if being lifted by a slight breeze.

  Marius had said he’d seen St. Peter appear from behind a tapestry down here. Was it this tapestry? Footsteps were rapidly coming my way. Still crouched, I lunged for the tapestry, pulling the heavy cloth out from the wall, and ducked behind it, feeling like the biggest fool when I discovered there wasn’t a door hidden there. And there was no way they weren’t going to notice a cherub-size lump bulging out from the wall. The footsteps stopped right in front of me, and I heard Alexi’s mocking laughter.

  “I thought you were smarter than this, Xavier. But I shouldn’t be surprised at how deep your dumbassery goes?”

  Dumbassery? Was that even a word? I toyed with coming out swinging to try and save some face, when something poked me in the back. I reached behind me and grasped what turned out to be a doorknob. I didn’t have to turn it because it opened behind me and a hand jerked me so hard I fell backward into a small, round room. The door I’d just fallen through vanished again.

  “Hello, Xavier,” said a familiar voice. And I looked up into the kindly face of my old boss, St. Peter.

  SEVENTEEN

  Desi woke up in pain. Her head hurt like hell, and her arms and face were covered in small cuts that oozed blood. There were tears in her clothes and tiny pieces of glass in her hair. When she tried to sit up, she found she couldn’t sit up all the way because she was sitting on a stainless steel counter locked inside some kind of cage about the size of the ones she’d once seen in a dog kennel. And judging by the smell and dried stains on the bottom of the cage, she wouldn’t be surprised if some kind of animal had been kept in there. She spotted something white in the corner of the cage, picked it up, and held it up to her face to get a better look. It was a tooth, a human tooth. An incisor. She dropped the tooth. Her stomach roiled, and she frantically rattled the cage.

  “Let me out! Let me out of here!”

  She knew losing her cool wasn’t helping, but for as long as she could remember, she’d had a pathological fear of having her air supply cut off, and although plenty of air circulated through the cage, she felt panicky and short of breath.

  “Don’t wear yourself out, Agent West,” said Dr. Langdon Grace. “No one can hear you down here.”

  Langdon Grace sat at a desk wearing a lab coat, with his feet propped up and Desi’s EA badge, Glock, cell phone, and knife spread out in front of him.

  “So the Equinox Agency has gotten wind of my little project and sent you here to investigate. I’m so flattered. But I must admit that from everything I’ve heard about your little organization, I’m a bit less than impressed with who they’ve sent here to stop me.” He smiled, and Desi, wanting nothing more than to smash his face in, rattled the cage again, happy to be able to repurpose her panic over being in the cage into rage at Grace.

  “You’re making the NeCro? So I guess that means you’re also the one pulling Zander Ptolemy’s and Vic Buchard’s strings? And by the way, what the hell have you done to Vic? Where is he?”

  “Ah, poor Vic.” He got up and donned a pair of latex gloves. “So eager to please and such a hard worker, but a little too principled for my tastes. I can still remember the look of horror on his face when I told him we didn’t have FDA approval to test NeCro on human subjects. It was almost as bad as the look on his face when he found out that he was one of my human test subjects. My very first test subject actually. I’d been putting it in his food. He didn’t even realize it.”

  “That’s sick!” said Desi.

  Grace didn’t seem to have noticed she’d spoken and continued,

  “But he felt fabulous in the beginning because the reanimated brain matter in the NeCro cannibalizes everything bad first. So if you have cancer, a chemical imbalance, an addiction, an ulcer, or what have you, it eats all that away, leaving you feeling wonderful. But it doesn’t stop with the bad stuff. It’s instantly addictive, and as long as you take it, it keeps eating and eating until there’s nothing left, and toward the end, your body craves flesh and tissue to replace what it’s lost.”

  “And Zander let you do that to his brother?”

  “Zander practically handed his little brother to me on a silver platter, Agent West. He’s an unlicensed necromancer with delusions of grandeur that needed a way to prove himself. He can’t even reanimate an entire corpse, only body parts. He told me if I took him on to help me develop my drug, he’d throw in his chemist brother as a bonus.”

  Grace picked up Desi’s knife from the desk and absently sliced open his palm with it. She was horrified to see that not only did the holy water the knife had been dipped in not have an effect on him, but the edges of the cut quickly mended together and healed. He did it three more times, and only her gasp of disbelief stopped him. He looked over at her and grinned.

  “What are you? Why are you doing this?”

  “As you’ve already guessed, I’m not human, well, not entirely at any rate. And I have no love for your kind. You’ve had your shot here on earth and for millions of years, and you’ve done nothing but fuck it all up with your filthy warmongering and disease spreading and your rampant ignorance. It’s our turn now. Once this drug gets onto the market, it won’t be long before humanity is wiped out, and we’ll be running things.”

  “No matter what happens to me, the EA is already on to you, Grace. They’ll stop you!”

  “We’ll see about that now, won’t we? And even if they do stop me, which is highly doubtful, they can’t stop the shipments that are going out tonight to drugstores and street corners across the country.”

  “What are you going to do with that?” Desi watched as he stuck a hypodermic needle into several NeCro capsules, filling the syringe with the red liquid.

  “I’m going to introduce you to NeCro, and when you start craving flesh, send you back to your agency so you can eat.”

  Desi managed to roll onto her back and use both feet to kick at the door of the cage, but it wouldn’t budge. Grace walked slowly across the room, looking amused at her terror. He paused for just an instant before walking behind her and sticking the needle through the cage into the meat of her left buttock. She cried out, trying to twist around to grab the needle. But before Grace could depress the plunger, shooting the vile liquid into her body, a massive explosion shook the building, sending Grace and the cage flying to the floor. The impact broke the cage open, and Desi scrambled out and got to her feet, then pulled the still-full needle from her butt.

  The sound of screaming and fire alarms could be heard from up above, and smoke rolled from under the door. Grace was lying on the floor groaning, between Desi and the steps leading to the floors ab
ove. She spied her Glock on the floor under Grace’s desk and ran toward it, but Grace spotted it, too, and got there first. He grabbed the gun and fired it at her, narrowly missing Desi as she dove behind the stainless steel counter and hid behind a bank of freestanding lockers. Grace fired again, hitting the lockers. She’d be damned if she’d let this freak kill her with her own damned gun. As soon as he got close enough, she pushed with all her might, toppling the heavy lockers on top of Grace, and took off running for the stairs. She heard a crash and turned to see the lockers that had been on top of Grace fly across the room. As curious as she’d been about just what kind of creature Dr. Langdon Grace was, she wasn’t about to stick around to find out and risk ending up back in that cage.

  She managed to get up the steps and to the door, but Grace wasn’t finished with her yet. Wind ruffled her hair and blew the smoke filling the room. With her hand still on the doorknob, Desi turned to see Grace hovering in the air, being held aloft by an enormous pair of black wings. Before she could react, he flew at her, purposefully knocking her down as he tried to get past her. They spilled out into the hallway.

  “Oh, no, you don’t!” she screamed.

  Desi grabbed hold of his foot, only to be dragged and then lifted a few feet into the air as Grace began his ascent up through the open stairwell to the floor above. Grace used his other foot to pry the shoe she was holding off of his foot and send her crashing to the floor below. She got up and threw the shoe at him, but he’d already landed on the floor above. Desi raced up the stairs after him, coming out into the lobby. It was complete chaos. A stampede of people desperate to get out the door nearly knocked Desi down. She didn’t see Grace anywhere and figured he’d left the building. Thick black smoke made it hard to breathe or see.

  Then Desi saw the source of the explosion. A car that must been rigged with dynamite or some other explosive had been driven straight through the lobby doors right into the building. The remains of Megan, the receptionist, lay beneath the burning husk of the car, which had smashed the receptionist station to pieces and had only stopped when it had hit the wall. The front end of the car hung out of the hole in the wall made when it exploded. Picking her way through the destruction, Desi almost fell when she stepped on one of the glass balls from the chandelier that had been hanging from the ceiling but were now all over the floor.

  Desi tore a strip from her already torn shirt and put it over her nose and mouth and scanned the wreckage for survivors. Liz, the human resources lizard shifter, lay dead among the debris, impaled through the chest by a large shard of glass, with her long tongue hanging out of the side of her mouth. Someone lay moaning on the floor underneath a burning chair, and Desi rushed over to help. Wrapping her hand in the piece of shirt, she managed to push the heavy chair off of a woman. At least Desi thought it was a woman. The person looked like a skeleton and was covered in sores. But Desi could tell that the explosion hadn’t caused the way she looked.

  “Is . . . he dead?” asked the woman in a weak voice, and then she started coughing up black phlegm, reminding Desi of the female corpse on Morel’s autopsy table.

  Dear God, Desi thought, a NeCro addict. She wondered how many more of them were out there.

  “What’s your name?” Desi cradled the woman’s head in her lap.

  “Cry . . . stal . . . Is . . . he dead?” The woman was more insistent this time. This was the woman Xavier Knight had been looking for, thought Desi. Did he know what she’d been planning to do? Why hadn’t he told her?

  “Is who dead?”

  “Grace . . . Dr. Grace.”

  “Crystal, are you the one who did this?”

  “Wanted . . . to kill . . . him . . . and me, too.” She could barely get the words out. “Jumped . . . out . . . at the last . . . minute. I . . . don’t want . . . to . . . die.” A single black tear rolled down her cheek.

  “Why did you want Grace to die?” Desi already knew the answer but just wanted one more reason to kill him.

  “He’s a monster . . . a mon . . . ster . . .” Crystal’s voice trailed off, and her eyes fluttered before closing. Desi put two fingers to the side of her neck to feel for her pulse, but there wasn’t one.

  She gently laid Crystal back down on the ground and ran outside, pushing through the throng of people wandering around coughing from the smoke, bleeding and in a daze just outside the doors. Grace wasn’t among them.

  “Dammit!” She kicked her tire in disgust when she got to the parking garage and called into the EA on her radio and reported what had happened.

  A crew would need to be dispatched to, at the very least, sift through the wreckage of Necropolis Pharmaceuticals and retrieve the bodies of poor Crystal, the lizard lady, and any other nonhuman employees before they got taken to the regular morgue, resulting in a headache for the EA. They’d also need to look through Grace’s lab to see if they could find any info about the NeCro shipment he’d bragged about.

  After retrieving her back-up Glock and spare badge from her glovebox, Desi was headed back into town when she noticed the traffic backed up on the other side of the median, going toward Necropolis. Police cars and ambulances were everywhere. She drove past a horrendous crash site and saw more ambulances flying down the median past the crash site, most likely on their way to Necropolis. Traffic had begun to slow on her side now. There were flashing lights up ahead. Desi flipped on her police scanner to discover a police barricade had been set up because of a suspected terrorist attack on Necropolis Pharmaceuticals.

  “Are you kidding me?” She leaned her head against her steering wheel. “I don’t have time for this! I’ve got a flying creep to catch!”

  Desi didn’t know what made her look across the highway at the Range Rover sitting in traffic. But something made her take a closer look. It must have been the young, blond man sitting in the passenger seat who reminded her with a pang of David Granger. Wait a minute. Desi pulled her car out of traffic and parked on the side of the road to get a closer look. It was David Granger. Desi got out and ran across the median and pounded on the window, startling the young man so badly he almost shot through the roof. Once he recognized her, he just stared at her in shock before letting down the window.

  “Going my way?” Desi asked.

  EIGHTEEN

  One of the things I’d always admired about my old boss was his sense of style. The man dressed better than anyone I know. And I wasn’t surprised to see that nothing had changed in the year since I’d been gone. St. Peter stood before me wearing a black three-piece Brooks Brother’s suit, a crisp white shirt, and a gray and white striped tie. Everything was pressed to perfection. His shoes were so shiny I could see my miserable reflection in them. He wore his salt and pepper hair cropped close, and I noticed he’d grown a goatee.

  “Xavier.” He leaned down and embraced me, but I didn’t hug him back.

  This had to be a trap. He’d not said one damned thing to me since the seraph guard had taken me into custody a year ago. Not a single word. I’d expected him to tell me how disappointed he was in me or ask for my side of the story or punch me or simply ask me why I’d done it. But he’d not asked me anything. Wouldn’t even look at me during my trial. Not that it had been much of a trial. The only ones present had been me, St. Peter, and the archangels. It went something like this.

  “Guardian Xavier, you’ve been charged with one count of consorting with a mortal woman, and one count of negligence in failing to prevent the death of a charge. How do you plead?”

  “Guilty,” I’d said, because, really, what the hell else could I have said? Busted is busted.

  “Then I sentence you to be clipped of your wings and cast out from heaven to live the remainder of your existence as a mortal. Yada, yada, yada. Blah, blah, blah.” There’d been more, but I’d pretty much stopped listening after the clipped-of-your-wings part.

  I didn’t expect anyone to stand up for me. I was as wrong as Spam at a luau. But my boss at least telling me good-bye would have meant a whole lot. A
nd now finding out from Marius about a secret archive housing angel fuckups and I’d hardly been the first, well, that made it all ten times worse.

  “Looking good as usual, SP.”

  “Still angry with me, Xavier?” He was making me feel like a sulky little kid, which wasn’t helped by my being cherub-size. He let his arms drop from around me but kept a hand on my shoulder.

  “Sorry, but I’m sensing that whatever power got you here is fading. If I break physical contact, you’ll disappear from the archive.”

  “Do you mean the regular archive or the secret archive we’re standing in?” He visibly flinched and wouldn’t look me in the eye. And he almost could now because I’d just grown another couple of inches.

  “I know how this all must seem to you, Xavier . . .” he began before I cut him off.

  “Do you have my last Book of Fates?” I asked, but then I realized that even if he did, I still wouldn’t be able to read it.

  “I can’t keep you here much longer, Xavier. So why don’t you just ask me what you really want to know?”

  “All right then. Did you write Ava Duval’s name in your Book of Order as someone that needed saving?”