Queen of the Fallen (Second Death Book 2)

by Brian Rella

  Roy was giddy at the description of the Arraziel. Wait until they meet me!

  There was no mention of where the girl might be, but the article explained she was believed to be from a small town in Louisiana called Beauchamp. Her mother and step-father resided there and had tipped off the police who the girl was when they had seen the video on the news.

  Roy was straight-faced as he dropped his gaze to the man. “You’ve done well,” Roy said.

  The man grabbed hold of Roy’s hand and rubbed his face on it. “Thank you, master. Thank you. I serve only you. Thank you.”

  “You serve only me,” Roy said. “And the best way for you to serve me is as part of my army. My demon horde. My Legion.”

  Legion dove at the man from all angles and Roy stepped back. Shrieks of anguish and agony filled the room. Blood sprayed and splattered across Roy’s face as the demon tore chunks of flesh from him. After a few moments, the man stopped screaming and was absorbed into the horde.

  Roy cracked his fingers, his face impassive as he surveyed the broken room. “Come on,” he said. “We’re going to Louisiana.”

  13

  BRENNAN

  October 27, 2015

  New York, New York

  His first vision had come when he was five. He had been in the garage of his parents’ house with his two-wheeler turned upside down on the seat and handlebars, pretending to be a mechanic working on the training wheels. He imagined himself a handyman like his father, Thomas. Thomas O’Malley was a wiry man with dark black curly hair and steely blue eyes. Thomas eked out a living for his small family doing odd jobs around town for the shops on Main, or for the Church, or whoever would give him a few bucks for a hard day’s manual toiling. What his father didn’t spend on booze would come home to his mother, and that, combined with the money from the sewing and housecleaning she did, would put food on the table, keep the heat on, and put the best clothes the Salvation Army had on Brennan’s back. Those were the good times.

  Being raised by a man beholden to the bottle was not always easy on Brennan. His father had a temper, and on occasion the belt would come off his waist faster than a freight train and that tanned leather would lick Brennan’s behind for several minutes as punishment for just about anything that had pissed his father off in a given moment. Brennan had been terrified of his father for a time, at least until he discovered what he was and what he could do, and then the tables turned on dear ol’ dad and it was Brennan’s father who was the terrified one.

  But that hadn’t happened yet the day Brennan had a seizure in the garage while playing fix-it-man on his bicycle. It was the first time Brennan had experienced the vivid visions that came with his Watcher’s powers, and he had been unprepared for the ferocity with which the episode upended him. He flailed about when the vision came, knocking down the shelving above him, and sending several cans of Behr #5 White Exterior paint to the garage floor. Those cans had been bought ahead of time with Silas Jones’ money for painting his fence this weekend, and when Brennan saw two cans pop open and the white puddle of paint begin to spread across the garage floor, his hands went to his backside and his heart welled up with dread. Brennan knew his father would be pissed and that tanned leather with the crack at the hole which Thomas O’Malley used every day would slide off his father’s waist and lick his bottom something awful.

  Brennan’s tears mixed with the paint of the floor while he did his five-year-old best trying to clean up the mess. The whole time all he thought about was that belt coming down on his bottom like a freight train, leaving those raised welts that got fire-engine red and stung for days after. He knew he wouldn’t be able to sit right for at least two days, and the more he thought about that, the more of a mess he made trying to clean up.

  He remembered blubbering how sorry he was through the tears, and that had sprung a thought in his mind that he acted upon with immediacy. His mother always said to read the Bible when he was seeking forgiveness, and he sure was seeking forgiveness from his father for the mess he’d made. So Brennan ran into the house to get his mother’s Bible from the kitchen to seek that forgiveness. He tracked little white shoe prints of the white paint across the already worn and scratched wooden floor of the hallway leading to the kitchen. He climbed up onto the counter, leaving a partial handprint of paint on the counter and the cupboard where the Bible was kept. He grabbed the Good Book and a flashlight from the same cupboard, and then he retraced his tracks back the way he came leaving a few drips and drabs of paint on the worn, wood floor again, and then some more on the grass out to his father’s wood shed in the back behind the huge oak.

  Under the wood shed, between the ground and the floorboards, was a crawl space just big enough for a five-year-old to hide. Brennan was an excellent reader and writer at five. He didn’t know all of the words in the verses of the Good Book, but he knew a lot of them and had read the Bible so many times with his mother that he could recite a lot of the passages from memory. He sat under that shed throughout the day, skipping his lunch and supper reading the Bible, and the world around him disappeared. He ignored the calls from his mother that supper was ready when the sunlight dimmed and faded. When it got dark, he switched on the flashlight and used it until the battery burned out, and then the shouts and curses and threats from his father started to come. The dread and terror mixed with the tears, and suddenly he started to glow a sky-blue in the darkness under the wood shed, and it gave him enough light to read by, so he lost himself in the Bible again, the world around him disappearing like before.

  He picked his head up a few times because his tummy started growling at him, but his daddy’s shouts were still coming and he decided to wait for them to stop. When they finally did, he waited some more until he figured his daddy was asleep. By that time, he was tired himself and half-starved, so he made his way back into the house on tip-toe and found his mother waiting for him at the kitchen table. Her eyes were red and swollen and she let loose a strangled sob and gave him a big hug when he ran up to her, and then the tears spilled from his eyes again by the buckets.

  His mama had cleaned up the paint pretty good, and his daddy had been so drunk he didn’t get his licks that night or the next. Eventually the whole incident passed without any harm coming to little Brennan, but one thing had stayed with Brennan from that day forward: he found sanctuary reading the Bible. It was that incident with his father that had sent him into God’s arms and on a path to be a Watcher-scholar, in hindsight.

  That place under the wood shed had been a peaceful place for Brennan and one he sought often times when his father had gone off on the drink. As he descended into the vast underground Watcher’s East Coast Operations Facility he was surrounded in peaceful, dark silence just like that place under the wood shed by the big oak in the back of his childhood home had provided, and he looked forward to disappearing into the ancient texts and the worlds they described.

  The Ops Facility had been built along with the original construction of St. Patrick’s Cathedral during the United States Civil War. As the war ravaged the country, the Order had secretly established its primary residence in the States here in New York in partnership with the Catholic Church. Other branches of the Order had sprung up around the country, but this location had come to be the center of knowledge and base of operations for the Order in America. It was here, underground, where Brennan did most of his work for the Order, watching the flow of information come into his web, catching it, filtering it, and sending relevant bits back to the Council or to Watchers in the field to support the ongoing battle with the Fallen.

  The facility was completely self-sufficient. Power, water, sewage, bunks, internet, and even an underground garden had been part of the original construction. The place was fortified and impenetrable from the outside world, except through the secret entrance in the rectory and one other entrance below ground via old tunnels from the construction of the Lexington Line subway. It stretched far and wide, from Fiftieth Street to Forty-seventh Street, a
nd from Park Avenue to the Avenue of the Americas. It was larger than two soccer pitches and contained almost all of the ancient esoteric manuscripts of the Order. You might say it was an historian’s paradise, replete with all the things a bookworm like Brennan could desire. That was a small list for sure—thousands of books, lighting, a chair, pen and paper, and a bathroom. Everything else was superfluous in Brennan’s opinion.

  Brennan fixed his white collar around his neck and pressed his black shirt flat as he walked past the stacks of books that towered above the concrete floor. At the southernmost end of the facility was the command center. The soft hum of electricity that powered the computers and servers gathering information from around the world in search of the Fallen filled the air. This was the nerve center of the Order’s regional operations and Brennan was its commander.

  He sat down at his desk, the leather chair fitted to his body from his long hours of sitting in it, and logged into the Order’s network, quickly sending a message to the members of the council requesting an urgent meeting to discuss the recent happenings in Chicago, his concerns about Jessie, and his beliefs about Jack. The Order was spread out around the globe, but the leadership was based in Rome, and given the hour, he didn’t expect an immediate response. He had some much needed reprieve and research to do before the call, so he moved back to the stacks and began pulling books, while waiting for a response.

  Brennan knew the library catalogue by heart and quickly moved from one stack to another, readily finding the ancient books he sought for his research: Liber Logaeth, also known as the Book of Enoch; the Aldaraia, the Book of Soyga; and Kholtara, the Book of Razmus, and a Sumerian-to-English dictionary. The mysteries of the Watchers and the Fallen were spread throughout the ages in different texts, each giving a clue to solving the mysteries he was trying to unravel. He’d read most of the major works already, but had some salient points to double check and document before presenting to the leadership.

  At a second thought, he gathered a few other texts that might contain additional information key to understanding the events that had occurred, placed them on a cart, and hauled them over to the table to spread out. By the time he had all the books together, hours had passed, and a secure connection request was waiting for him from the Council of the Order.

  Accepting it, his screen came to life with the faces of the eleven-member council. Five men and six women glanced up from whatever they were doing while they had been waiting for him to respond and stared back at him. For a moment, Brennan faltered. He had called them all together with the intention of explaining his intuition after his research had been completed. His message had been urgent, and perhaps too urgent. His hopes to have completed research and concrete conclusions from the texts evaporated and he realized he would have to present to the council his suspicions, hunches, and instincts, rather than facts. Well, best to begin at the beginning, then.

  He glanced around the screen at the stiff, regal members of the council, searching for the right words to begin. His eyes landed on the leader of the council, Delphine Magliano. Her silvery hair, olive skin, and sharp features drew him in, and the words flowed.

  “Delphine, members of the council, thank you for coming together under such short notice,” he began. “As you are no doubt aware, there has been a great disturbance here in the U.S. A girl has set free two powerful members of the Fallen. She—”

  “Father Brennan,” Delphine cut in, her Italian accent dancing with the English syllables. “We are aware of the events. Do you have any new information?”

  Nothing like getting right to the point. “I do, Delphine, and I am seeking the council’s opinion on the matter.”

  “Go ahead, Brennan,” she replied.

  “In short, I believe this could be the beginning of the fulfillment of the Prophecy of Razmus,” he said, staring directly into the black eyes of Delphine. She blinked slowly, but her poker face remained intact.

  “Go on,” Artimus, another member of the council, said.

  Brennan wasn’t as prepared as he would have liked, and that made him nervous, but he continued to muddle through nonetheless, and hoped the Council would agree with his instincts and assessments. He began shifting papers and opening books around his desk in an effort to reference the evidence supporting his theory while he spoke.

  “I… It says in the Book of Razmus… I just need to find the…” he stumbled around his desk and words.

  Another voice broke in. “And so the day will come when the spirits of the Fallen will rise again to retake the land of the living.” It was Elias Lauderdale. He was the greatest scholar among them, Brennan included, and had memorized hundreds, if not thousands, of ancient texts which he could recite at will—though he often lacked the ability to apply his knowledge to the real world. “To smite the Creator and his creations for exiling them in the Second Death.

  “A girl shall rise before her time and ascend to become the Queen of the Fallen and bring forth the Heart of Darkness.

  “Through forked tongue and shadowy whispers, the Leech of Aeons shall impute his wickedness upon the girl and together they shall make servants of man once more.

  “But the Creator will not forsake his people, and from the line of Razmus, one shall rise with the mark of the Creator upon him.

  “And he shall battle the army of darkness and defeat the King of the Fallen.”

  Thanks for the save, Elias. Brennan smiled nervously into his webcam. “Yes, that’s the passage. Thank you, Elias.”

  “And what makes you think this girl from Chicago is the queen Razmus spoke of?” Delphine asked.

  Instinct. “I am not sure, Delphine. I only suspect. I also had a boy come to me, and he may be the one Razmus speaks of. The manuscripts are vague and I am unsure if this is the case, but I thought, given the state of things, it would be prudent to call the council together to seek your guidance on…my proposal.”

  “And what is your proposal, Father Brennan?” Elizabeth Statin said. She was the oldest member of the council, quite bald, probably blind, and rarely spoke.

  “The boy is here in the city. If he is the One, he will have the mark. I will check him and if it is indeed the case—”

  “Then we must prepare him for war, as we must prepare all Watchers,” Delphine cut him off.

  “Yes, I agree,” Brennan said. “There is more. The government here has taken over the search for the girl. The sighting in Chicago has caused them complications and they wish to sideline us for the time being until they can get the story and the media under control. I would propose we let them, while we focus on the boy.”

  Delphine nodded at Brennan and leaned forward into the camera. “Council, what say you?” she asked.

  Everyone on the screen nodded and spoke in agreement.

  “Very well. It is agreed the boy will be verified and trained accordingly. The girl will be left to the U.S. government for now. Brennan, we leave these tasks in your able hands and will look forward to your report on progress.”

  “Agreed,” the rest of the council all said.

  “Thank you, Delphine, members of the council,” he said. The connection ended and Brennan sat back in his chair.

  Now, where are Frank and the boys?

  14

  FRANK

  October 27, 2015

  New York, New York

  Frank walked down the hall to the last room on the left. The door to Sarah’s room was ajar and he paused outside listening to her soft breathing and the gentle beep of the EKG machine tracking her heartbeat. He peered in through the space at the door before tapping on it lightly.

  Nic glanced up, frowning, his eyes hard as they met Frank’s. Jack never looked away from whatever had his attention on the floor.

  “You boys okay?” he asked. Dumbass—of course they’re not okay.

  Nic scowled and turned back to his mother. Frank stepped into the room, closing the door behind him.

  Sarah’s hysteria was gone and she was resting peacefully. Frank
could smell the chemical sedative the doctors had injected her with seeping from her pores and mixing with the industrial cleaner that also scented the room. He gazed at her with pity and understanding. She’d cracked under the emotional and mental strain of her circumstances. He imagined she’d gone through a lot with her two boys and no husband to lean on for support. She’d already had the world on her shoulders when Brennan broke the news to her about Jack and the Watchers and the Fallen. In retrospect, her reaction should have been a foregone conclusion. Frank’s mother had been through similar circumstances, and look at her. Everybody has twenty-twenty vision in hindsight. That was a phrase Frank’s father had often used. It wasn’t much of a comfort for Frank now, in any case. Certainly wasn’t for the family in front of him.

  He tried to imagine what it was like being a single mother and raising two boys on your own. Even forgetting the freaky shit Jack was going through, he couldn’t put himself in those shoes. Hard, is all he could think of. Hard as hell. When a Watcher’s power began to manifest, there was no context to put it in that would help a non-Watcher understand. So in a sense the brother, mother, and son were all alone in dealing with Jack’s changes, with no guide to support or to help them through. No wonder something had broken inside of her. Him too. Look at him. He’s a pale shadow of a boy. I can help him. Maybe.

  “We should go,” Frank said. “She needs to rest, and we have things to discuss.”

  Neither boy moved. He tried again appealing to their stomachs.

  “You boys must be hungry. We’ve got food back at the rectory. Come on,” he said.

  Frank heard their stomachs rumble. Nic stirred and looked sideways at Frank. “We’re coming back tomorrow morning. First thing.”