Addictive Paranormal Reads Halloween Box Set

by Nana Malone

  * * * * *

  Chapter 45

  For … God spared not the angels that sinned,

  But cast them down to hell,

  And delivered them into chains of darkness,

  To be reserved unto judgment

  2 Peter 2:4

  April 1, 2003

  Al-Najaf Airstrip, Najaf, Iraq

  “This one looks pretty good,” Mary drawled in her languid Texas twang. “Any more waiting in the queue?”

  Elisabeth glanced up from the bullet she fished out of an elderly man’s shoulder just in time to see Corporal DuBois sidle up behind the ‘humor’ of their little three-man operation with an enormous bouquet of alliums, trench coat, boonie-hat, dark sunglasses and what appeared to be a thin veneer of makeup hiding his striped skin.

  “Behind you,” Elisabeth said. With a furtive glance and nod, she alerted Lucy to the soap opera about to unfold in their emergency room.

  Lucy gave Mary a knowing smile. Lucy dug a piece of shrapnel out of another Al-Quds militiaman who’d opted to throw his fate to the mercy of the 70th Armored Regiment rather than help the Ba’athist leader who’d seized control of their city. Only Elisabeth knew the Ba’athist leader was a demon. Literally. Or more accurately, a malignant god.

  “M-m-miss…” Corporal DuBois stammered to Mary, “I … uh … found these at the side of the airstrip and thought … uh … well … thank you.”

  “Oh!” Mary glanced up at the Sata’an-human hybrid soldier who she’d drawn far more blood out of yesterday than should have been possible to save the life of his brother-in-arms. “Corporal DuBois! How very … um … thoughtful?”

  Elisabeth sighed and focused back on the bullet which had, luckily, not hit anything vital. Azrael had warned his allies were attracted to full-blooded human females. He just hadn’t warned her how attracted. Less than 24 hours after they’d patched up Corporal Kennard, the gut-shredded victim, and already both nurses had received numerous requests for dinner, movie-night, rides in top-secret military vehicles, including vehicles which human technology still believed to be theoretically impossible, and just about any other activity which might impress a human female enough to give a lizard-man the time of day.

  She, on the other hand, was given a wide berth. Corporal Tills hadn't spelled it out, but it was obvious these men considered her to be ‘Az’s girl.’ Elisabeth smiled, accidentally causing her patient to grunt in pain.

  “I’m sorry…” she ground out in halting Arabic. “Not better.” What she wanted to say was that she was sorry she didn’t have a better local anesthetic to numb the pain while she fished out the bullet. How she missed Kadima!

  The old man let loose an unintelligible string of Arabic words that might, or might not, be understanding. He lifted one liver-spotted hand to touch hers, nodding approval. Whether he understood or not, he was grateful she made the effort to help her enemy and treat him kindly.

  “A pox upon Chemosh’s genitals for sending old men to do a young man’s job,” Elisabeth hissed as she finally got the slender surgical tweezers around the lead and gently tugged it out.

  “Who?” Lucy asked.

  “Um … the Ba’athist leader,” Elisabeth phrased her answer to be truthful without revealing more than her colleagues needed to know. “He’s a real … um … demon.”

  “I thought that was my job description?” Corporal DuBois grinned, exposing fang-like incisors inherited from a long-dead Sata'anic ancestor.

  Mary recoiled. Elisabeth winced along with her, but not for the same reason. Corporal DuBois had been knocking himself out, hoping to get Mary to give him the time of day. Although Mary accepted her new top-secret assignment, which Elisabeth had painted as nursing super-soldiers with animal DNA spliced into their genome by some DARPA mad scientist, it was a far cry from being ‘color-blind’ to the Sata’an descendants differences. For the first time in her life, Elisabeth was glad she’d spent a decade living in neighborhoods where she was the minority. It made her more sensitive to the discrimination the Sata’anic descendants faced for something which was not their fault.

  Her Al-Quds patient also noted the fangs and glanced fearfully at the Sata’an Corporal, who had to be breaking twenty different protocols when there were human patients in their midst. Corporal DuBois was assigned to protect them in case one of the prisoners turned on them, but unlike the other Sata’an-human hybrids, he hadn’t faded into the walls of the tent.

  “It’s okay.” Elisabeth used a soothing voice to distract the old man. “Here. Look. Here’s your bullet. A little souvenir to show your grandkids once the 70th Armored Regiment finishes chasing out the rest of the bad guys.”

  She placed the bullet in the palm of her patient’s hand and closed his fingers around it. The close physical contact from a female, an American female, did the trick. It distracted the old man from scrutinizing the nearly seven foot tall lizard-man bearing flowers.

  “Shukran,” the old man thanked her. His face lit up with interest as he held the bullet close to his rheumy eyes, grimacing once as Elisabeth finished stitching up the bullet hole in his bicep.

  Elisabeth sensed Az make his entrance someplace off to her side. Corporal DuBois sensed it, as well. He nodded in Azrael’s direction. With the 70th Armored Regiment mopping up the aftermath of what had to be the biggest tank-battle since World War II, she knew he couldn’t stay, but she appreciated the fact he’d taken the time to pop in.

  ‘How goes the battle?’ Elisabeth pictured putting the words into a little balloon as Az had taught her. A pleasant tingle went down her spine as Azrael lingered on the tendril she offered. It was as close to touch as she could get with an angel whose touch was death.

  Vague images came into her mind. The demon-god had escaped. Frustration. Moloch’s Agents still in the city, whispering suggestions to those predisposed to fight on the side of the Saddam Fedayeen. It wasn’t speech, but it was communication. She was learning.

  Her Al-Quds patient touched her hand, an inquiry in his eyes as he rattled off words she couldn’t understand in Arabic. He wondered why she stopped, mid-stitch, to stare off into an empty corner of the tent.

  “Sorry.” Elisabeth gave her patient a smile to convey what words could not. “Been working too many hours. Everything’s fine.”

  She sensed one last non-corporeal touch, urgency and regret, and then he was gone back to do whatever Angels of Death did whenever they walked amongst human battlefields. He’d explained how he was able to tell whether the soul he reaped was an evil Agent, but it was all gibberish to her. Good, bad, or indifferent, Elisabeth patched back together whomever the medics hauled in.

  “This guy's all set,” Lucy interrupted her thoughts. “We got any more?”

  “We’re all set for now.” Corporal DuBois signaled Lucy’s patient that it was time to go. “Until the next transport arrives. I’ll take this one away to the detention area. Any restrictions?”

  “I’ve started him on a cycle of Cephalozin,” Lucy said. “He should be assigned a cot to recover.”

  “We’re out of cots,” Corporal DuBois said. “We’ve started bumping less-injured wounded for the more seriously injured. How high should I prioritize him?”

  “Elisabeth?” Lucy asked. “Could you do that … thing?”

  Elisabeth considered the wounds Lucy had just patched up using not only her training as a nurse, but also that ‘color thing’ Az had been teaching her to judge whether somebody's life-energy was strong, weak, or infected. Lucy’s patient was shaken, but not in life-threatening danger.

  “Can you get him a prayer-mat to lay down on?” Elisabeth asked.

  “Consider it done,” Corporal DuBois said. “The prisoners helped us string a camouflage net to give them shelter from the sun. I’ll assign one of his comrades to watch over him.”

  Elisabeth nodded assent.

  “Thanks,” Lucy said.

  Elisabeth finished bandaging the bullet-wound in her own patient and handed him over to Corporal D
uBois for similar handling. The old man had barely flinched as she’d fished out the bullet with minimal anesthetic. If he’d been a patient back in the United States, the old man would have yowled bloody murder.

  “I’m going to get a bite to eat,” Lucy said. “You need anything?”

  Elisabeth glanced up from the medical instruments she sterilized in preparation for the next shipment of wounded, whenever they came. It was inevitable they would come. In addition to Coalition casualties, there were reports of hundreds of Saddam Fedayeen and Al-Quds militia dead and god-knows-how-many wounded. Any break they had would be short-lived.

  “Um … not food.” Elisabeth gestured to the bloody mess littering the hospital tent. “But would you mind checking on how Corporal Kennard is doing after you eat? I’ll clean up here.”

  “Sure.” Lucy gave her a grin. Lucy was nearing middle-age and, as she herself put it, was as tall and plain as the South Dakota prairie from whence she’d come. Tail or no tail, the fact the handsome Corporal Kennard had awoken and been immediately smitten had the ‘brains’ of their little triage unit floating on air.

  “Thanks!” Elisabeth checked one promise off her list. She would do what she could to encourage Lucy to cross paths with the recovering gut-shredded patient. The rest was up to him.

  Now if only she could do something for poor, equally smitten Corporal DuBois, who’d taken the liberty of stopping by the mess tent on his way back from depositing their last patient in the detention area and brought back Mary a picnic lunch fit to feed a queen. Mary had the desperate expression of a gal cornered at a nightclub by a persistent guy who kept asking for a dance. It didn’t matter that, once you looked past the faint stripes which marred the Corporal’s otherwise human-looking skin, he was drop-dead gorgeous. Mary couldn’t get past the differences.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 46

  Gehenna

  “Please … No!!!” Cresil shrieked. “No … I’ll do anything … Please! Tell Lucifer … I’ll make a deal!!!”

  “Tell it to the families of the poor bastards you killed,” one of Lucifer’s guards hissed. “Payback is a bitch.”

  The Sata’an-human hybrids opened the doors to Cresil's containment canister and gave him a shove off the precipice. He screeched as he fell alongside his fellow Agent. With no host-body to inhabit, the gravitational pull of countless quantum singularities intersecting at a single multi-dimensional point in time and space sucked their consciousnesses down to the layer of Gehenna cordoned off for the worst of the very worst.

  The level inhabited by Moloch….

  Cresil landed with a thud on the fiery floor of the hell-dimension shaped by Moloch into a semblance of a great hall. As a creation/fire deity, it wasn’t the fires of Gehenna which kept Moloch imprisoned here, but his inability to shape a new mortal shell to counteract the gravitational pull of the birthplace of the countless universes ruled by Ki. None of them was evolved enough to make it through the innermost fires of Ki’s womb and emerge the other side as Azrael had done. Not even Moloch. It was the ultimate indignity … to be forced to watch his former wife use her own primordial essence to shape the matter Moloch had once used to create whatever caught his fancy.

  Balance. The former void-creature-turned-Ki liked nothing better than to rub Moloch’s face in the fact she’d been able to create within herself the inner peace to both create and destroy…

  “You failed me?” Moloch bellowed. “You fools gave me assurances you would not lose this war!”

  Moloch grabbed Cresil’s compatriot and shoved his consciousness into his maw before he could speak, his bovine tail twitching in frustration. Cresil dodged his meaty grasp, running shrieking towards the wall of fire which presented the choice Ki gave all imprisoned here as the energy released by his friend's destruction reverberated through Gehenna. Eaten? Or uncreation in the unearthly fire Ki used to recycle matter into the seeds of new universes as Malak al-Maut had chosen and somehow survived? Cresil hesitated, unable to will himself to take the final leap. None before or since had ever been able to do what the Angel of Death had done. Escape.

  Something grabbed his leg and lifted him upside-down like a rabbit caught in a snare.

  “Help!” Cresil shrieked as he was snatched out of the first god’s hands by one of the other major gods interred in this circle of hell. Tanit. Goddess of war.

  “Speak,” Tanit ordered, her voice sultry and smooth as she stroked him like he was a cat. “Speak truthfully and perhaps your god will spare you.”

  “Chemosh s-s-said we were to do everything we could to keep the Americans focused on Iraq,” the Cresil stuttered. “He-he-he said the idea was to occupy them there so your Agent in Afghanistan had time to bring your plans to fruition.”

  Moloch glanced down at the tendrils of consciousness dangling out of his mouth like strands of spaghetti from the first Agent he’d consumed. With an unapologetic belch, the bull-god gave Tanit a sheepish grin and finished slurping up the energy released from the destroyed consciousness of Cresil’s former conspirator.

  “Go,” Tanit put Cresil down and shooed him towards a series of caverns Moloch had carved out of the fires of hell to shelter his allies. “And be mindful to pay the others the proper respect so they don’t eat you. I’m surprised Lucifer interred one so meager in the seventh dimension of Gehenna. What crime were you charged with?”

  “Chemosh ordered us to guard the Grand Ayatollah,” the Agent said. “That void-creature you keep complaining about snuck up on us. I think he wants you to know he’s still around.”

  Fists clenched in rage, Moloch looked up towards the gateway guarded by Lucifer and screamed his ex-wife’s name so loudly that all of Gehenna trembled.

  “Ki!!!”

  ~ * ~ * ~

  Two elderly Jewish men sat, fishing lines tossed casually into the tiny stream somewhere close to the Valley of Hinnom, sharing a meaningful silence.

  The ground trembled. A bubble rose to the surface of the stream and broke. The slight odor of brimstone wafted lightly into the air before being harmlessly carried away by the wind.

  “Did you fart?” one of the men asked.

  * * * * *

  Chapter 47

  The vast universal suffering feel as thine:

  Thou must bear the sorrow

  That thou claimst to heal;

  The day-bringer must walk in darkest night.

  He who would save the world

  Must share its pain.

  If he knows not grief,

  How shall he find grief’s cure?

  Savitri by Sri Aurobindo

  April 2, 2003

  Valley of Jehoshaphat

  Azrael was smart enough to admit when he was outclassed. Not only was Moloch’s second-in-command a hell of a lot bigger and stronger than he was, but the bastard ran circles around him, outwitting him at every turn. Azrael knew of only one person in the universe capable of outthinking Moloch and his evil super-villain sidekick.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s … uh … indisposed.” The Sata’an-hybrid shifted uneasily from one foot to the other.

  “I need to speak to him right away,” Azrael twitched his wings with annoyance. “It’s important.”

  “Um … you’ll … uh … have to come back … uh … later,” the guard stammered. Behind him, the other half-human hybrids closed ranks behind their comrades. They were acting the way they usually did whenever the General appeared, as though someone meant their leader harm. Azrael looked over his shoulder, expecting to see he had company and was surprised to discover he had none.

  They were closing ranks against … him?

  “I don’t give a damn about whatever strumpet he’s bedding at the moment,” Azrael snapped. “He needs to do his job!”

  “He’s … um … you can’t … he … um,” Lucifer's men mumbled, tails twitching uneasily.

  “I need to speak to him,” Azrael allowed his face to assume its stern, grim reaper aspect. “Now.”


  The Sata’an-hybrid soldiers stepped out of his way. Chemosh had escaped Najaf, leaving behind lower-level Agents to stir up trouble by whispering Coalition forces intended to destroy the Grand Ayatollah’s mosque and kill him, not parley. But not for the wise American troop commander who’d ordered his troops to kneel before the mosque and retreat when an angry mob appeared to defend it, things would have gone the other way. Throughout Iraq, other cities fell with similar ease.

  It was too easy…

  There was an Earth saying, 'it takes a criminal.' Azrael strolled towards Lucifer's personal quarters, palatial rooms he’d only ever glimpsed from the main processing room, and banged upon the door.

  Nothing.

  He could feel Lucifer’s oversized consciousness. The bastard was here. He pounded harder. It wasn’t like him to be insistent, but then it wasn’t like him to go to Lucifer for help, either. Although it’d been the General who’d battled Chemosh and Moloch the last time around and thrown their sorry tailfeathers into Gehenna, it had been Lucifer who’d lured them close enough to Gehenna to be battled. Azrael was no good at subterfuge. Only Lucifer was devious enough to stay ahead of the game.

  Except Lucifer had been strangely absent given the conflict raging around them the past few days…

  “Lucifer!” Azrael shouted. “Put your pants back on and come talk to me! You can finish servicing whatever female you’re bedding later!”

  Silence. Not even a feminine giggle or one of Lucifer’s typical hung-over groans. Azrael sniffed. The scent of bleach and disinfectant filtered through the closed doors, not the usual stench of alcohol and semen he’d forever associate with the debauch son of the Eternal Emperor.