Too late, I realized what was going on, even though it seemed truly impossible. My stupid demon disguise was strong enough to even trick an angel? Give me a break! What the hell powered this thing?
Another thought made me wince. I’d asked Eae if he remembered the last time we met. Me, looking like a fallen angel, and casually asking an angel about the last time we’d met.
And Eae literally translated to demon thwarter…
No wonder Eae had looked about ready to kill me.
“And the bear?” Eae asked coolly.
“The First Shepherd likely has many questions for her. He will be sorely disappointed to hear that a friend of the White Rose now consorts with demons.” He said this matter-of-factly, but his voice was tinged with empathy and disappointment.
What name had they heard me shouting if not Michael’s?
I wondered, very briefly, who would have appeared if I would have said Michael’s name a third time—whether it would have summoned Michael or someone much, much worse. And if Michael had answered the call, only to find a demon behind it…a fearful shudder rocked me from neck to tailbone at the mere thought of that. Thankfully, Eae seemed convinced that it wouldn’t have worked, regardless. Thank god. I had dismissed the demon disguise concern, assuming that surely an angel would be able to see through it.
On the bright side, maybe I had just won a ticket to Abundant Angel—a chance to convince Fabrizio who I really was—
“This one was obviously attempting to summon a fellow demon,” Eae said, interrupting my train of thought as he flexed one of his wings high, the fanned feathers seeming to twinkle maliciously at the tips. “I would rather keep this city demon-free, as it has been for the past year. I think it’s best to cut out this first sign of cancer before it spreads.”
Arthur dipped his eyes respectfully. “As you wish, Eae. Take down the bear,” he commanded the two wizards beside him, already dismissing me entirely. My eyes widened in stunned disbelief. No trial or conversation? Just swift judgment? This wasn’t like Eae at all.
Eae locked eyes with me, his smile stretching wider. “And beheading is less paperwork,” he admitted, in the cold, merciless, soulless tone of a true devil—an accountant.
“No—”
His wing was already descending, and I knew it was sharp enough that I might not even feel my head separate from my body, because everything had spiraled downward so fast that I didn’t even have time to try considering throwing my power against it.
Two pinpoints of crackling blue flame within a thick white fog appeared out of nowhere and pounded into Eae’s wing, deflecting it enough to slam the tip down beside my ear rather than my neck. It sunk a few inches into the concrete with a sound that made my ears pop.
Eae spun wildly, knocked from atop me, and roaring with outrage. I gasped, coughing weakly as I struggled to my feet, stunned to find Last Breath—now in his huge bipedal white lion form—squaring off against Eae not five feet away from me.
I now had a new appreciation for his name, since he’d arrived just as I was certain I had taken my last breath. But how the hell had he found me, here in this random warehouse? And…why hadn’t he arrived to back me up sooner?
Claire had knocked down her two would-be captors—one was groaning on the ground beside a SHIT-shaped dent in the aluminum siding, and another was cursing from within a tower of toppled pallets.
Arthur held a sword steadily before him, his eyes flickering from me, to Claire, and finally to Eae and the albino lion dude, gauging which one he should focus on. He didn’t look scared but determined. It was hard to see Last Breath as anything other than a demon. What else was strong enough to stand up to an angel?
“Don’t kill them!” I shouted at both of my allies. “They know not what they do!”
Eae bellowed in outrage, hurling Last Breath off his chest and into a support beam, denting it with a shower of falling dust, before rounding on me with a glare. He glanced sharply back at Last Breath, a hesitant frown slowly crossing his features.
Arthur shouted out, his eyes focused entirely on Claire. “That thing was hunting the White Rose the last time I saw her. Might even be her killer. Do not let him escape.” The two SHITs were climbing to their feet, now, murderous frowns on their faces. Arthur spared a pitiless look at them. “Not you two fools!” he snapped, hurting their little feelings. “Get back to the church. This could be a diversion.” They nodded, looking both unhappy they were not permitted to fight yet also alarmed at the potential danger for the church if this was indeed a diversion—perhaps even the herald of a demonic invasion. They sprinted for the exit, not bothering to look back.
Which was surprising. Arthur—a non-wizard—facing down a shifter polar bear all by himself, and not looking even the slightest bit concerned?
Arthur followed their departure with his eyes as if making sure they weren’t ambushed by yet more of my secret demonic allies. In the distraction, I darted towards Claire and squeezed her furry arm—thankfully she had seen me coming in her peripheral vision or she might have instinctively decapitated me by sheer reflex. “We’re leaving!” I shouted at her. “We can’t beat them without killing them.” Claire’s ears tucked back against her head, but she kept her eyes locked on Arthur as I lifted the Seal of Solomon towards my lips.
Because it was the only way I could think of getting us to safety. I wasn’t about to battle it out with two of my old friends. They were just doing their jobs, battling what they thought was a demon. They certainly wouldn’t entertain a friendly debate on the virtues and vices of Callie Penrose—let alone give me the time to convince them who I really was.
Eae spun, aiming his angelic laser focused glare our way. His eyes darted to the silver ring on my knuckle and his lips parted wordlessly. I hesitated, feeling a flash of heat on my scalp as the Seal touched my lips. Last Breath suddenly gripped Eae by one of the wings and hurled him directly past us at Arthur—who was now sprinting towards us in an attempt to stop whatever he thought I was doing. The Angel slammed into Arthur, sending them both tumbling.
And the strangest thing happened as Last Breath grabbed onto Claire’s outstretched paw.
Namely, my two friends simply disappeared, violently ripped from my grip.
Before I could react, the scene before me froze like I had snapped a polaroid picture with my eyes. Then, like a newspaper catching alight, that polaroid picture bloomed with silver flames at the edges, racing inwards in an ever-shrinking ring of silver fire. It was surreal.
My eyes were riveted on the center of that photo.
At the incredulous look on both Eae and Arthur’s frozen faces. The silver flame met in the center and everything disintegrated to ashes, leaving me briefly hovering in a gray void of nothingness.
Then, like a pane of glass hit by a rock, the void simply shattered into billions of shards, and I thought to myself, what a lovely means of teleporting. So soothing and relaxing.
Darkness swallowed me up and then shat me right back out.
I closed my eyes in order to truly relish the unique experience.
To me, it corroborated my theory that even different planes of existence were operated by disgruntled, bitter, government employees who were counting down the hours until they could collect their pension and quit the jobs that they so loathed. Their one respite being those small opportunities that allowed them to cause as much anguish as possible to those poor, unfortunate souls forced to step in front of their greasy service windows.
Those customer service representatives handling me now were having the time of their lives.
Chapter 29
My existence was darkness—no source of light or sound—as I imagined hold music while waiting for the complaint department of inter-realm travel.
Your experience is not very important to us. Please remain in limbo for the next available operator. Wait time approximately five eternities.
Then, in reverse this time, a needlepoint of flame bloomed to life before me and expande
d outward in a raging wash of fire, eating away at the darkness to reveal a cavernous room of tan and red-flecked marble pillars. Tables laden with beakers, test tubes, books, and dozens of alchemical ingredients surrounded me as the fire finally reached the edges of my vision and hissed out like a puff of steam. I stood motionless, waiting for the other shoe to drop and something entirely abnormal to happen again. Maybe with ice this time.
But thankfully, nothing changed. I assessed the room warily, wondering where I was. Where my friends had gone. Had Eae done something to interrupt our travel, metaphysically kicking my ankle as I ran away?
“Who knows what an angel can do,” I murmured out loud, my voice echoing in the large marble chamber. The carved pillars were at least three times as wide as my waist, and I followed them up, and up, and up to finally spot the ceiling very high above, making me feel like I was in a canyon. I spun in a slow circle, searching for any other signs of life.
Just to be sure, I walked a quick circuit around the room, ignoring the doors that most likely led off to other rooms, verifying Claire or Last Breath weren’t hidden behind a couch or something, unconscious and choking to death on their own tongues. No luck.
Despite there being no sunlight, two mature trees leaned against the outer wall, seeming to grow out of the marble tile floor, the branches spreading wide with budding pink and white flowers decorating the leaves. I almost jumped out of my boots when the branches shifted slightly as if at a breeze. Except there was no breeze in this enclosed space. I nervously looked away from the trees.
A few couches and chairs littered the room, along with wardrobes, dressers, and numerous worktables cluttered to overflowing with even more varied collections of bizarre and strange items. Articles of clothing, shoes, and papers littered the floor, were draped over furniture, or lay in piles here and there, as if someone had left in a hurry, packing whatever they could grab in ten seconds or less.
It felt at once both cozy and clinical, like it was both a work space and living quarters.
With nothing else to do, I walked up to one of the tables that looked more recently used than the others. A handwritten journal lay open, and the pages were scrawled with what looked like a dozen different calculus equations. Except the variables looked like runes—demonic, angelic, druidic, Norse, Greek, zodiac, kanji, and even a few crude Hieroglyphs. I grunted at the complexity of the gibberish, shaking my head. “Looks like some unholy union of cutting-edge mathematics and various alphabets conceived a child—the language of creation,” I muttered absently, thinking out loud. My voice was immediately swallowed up by the vast space, making me feel like I stood at the bottom of a well.
I frowned, wondering where that thought had come from, why I’d called it the language of creation. Maybe it was because the equations consisted of symbols taken from the alphabets of a large variety of known languages. And letters, numbers, and symbols were the building blocks—the beginnings—needed to create language.
After a few moments, I was startled to realize I was leaning closer to the page, muttering under my breath and shaking my head—and I didn’t recall having moved. That was alarming, but my subconscious mind seemed to have chugged a bottle of Mountain Dew, cracked its knuckles, and then stepped up to the control station.
“Not the language of creation,” I said out loud, thinking over my earlier definition. Something about it just seemed wrong—or incomplete. “Alphabet…al…pha…bet,” I murmured, breaking down the syllables in order to pinpoint exactly what was bothering me. And that’s when it hit me.
Alpha. Alpha meant the beginning.
Conversely, Omega meant the end.
Alpha and Omega—the beginning and the end.
I realized I was nodding satisfactorily, leaning away from the paper with a sensation of accomplishment. I shuddered at the alien duality—my subconscious and conscious mind working as a team without my express choice. But…they were right. I was right.
This wasn’t the language of creation—a collection of individual alpha-bets…
This was a singular collection taken from those earlier, beginning alphabets to form something entirely new. I shuddered in realization.
This was…an omega-bet—the language of the end.
For some reason, that thought resonated within me like a perfectly-tuned guitar chord. Realizing that, I felt decidedly uneasy. Like the equations had purred to life at my revised definition, even though the revision hadn’t truly felt like my mind had birthed it. More like…
I’d read it from the equations, understanding it on some abstract, subconscious level.
Why in the world was someone building the omegabet—the language of the end?
I let out a nervous breath, deciding not to let myself study the equations too closely anymore. To give them only a cursory glance from here on out.
The equations were all jumbled together, implying that the previous half of the journal likely led up to the current theories on the open page before me, and I was expected to simply accept how the author had gotten to this point in their savant-level ramblings. Although I was no expert—despite what my subconscious thought—I sensed the equations were incomplete.
I flipped the thick leather page backwards to see hastily scrawled diagrams, thumbnail sketches of a sword, a pyramid, a lightning bolt, an hourglass, a broken halo, a hammer, two mountain peaks, and a feather. Feverishly flipping more pages, I found moon cycles, star charts, pages of Fae spells, a very rough map, a hurried drawing of a mountain and a rainbow—with a winged unicorn zipping towards it as if to impale the arch—and a few pages full of ornate family trees, using only initials to mark the branches.
I suddenly felt very self-conscious.
This was probably something I shouldn’t be looking at without permission, let alone unsupervised and without permission. It wasn’t mine, and this all looked very personal. Like a diary of a mad man. Yet…much of it looked hauntingly familiar, although I couldn’t quite place why. Perhaps my imagination was still running wild after my unexpected inter-realm Uber driver had suddenly kicked me off his intergalactic Vespa to land here.
I shook my head and took a step back, briefly taking in the rest of the long work table. On the far edge sat a collection of leather strips arranged to form the outline of a shattered sword—laid out in order so that the pieces needed only to be shifted closer to complete the blade. The pieces were made of old black leather, darker than coal, and seemed to be weighing down yet more scraps of paper filled with yet more diagrams, calculations and hastily scribbled notes. Just beside that rested a pile of old jewelry, consisting of enough precious stones to make a jeweler drool, and a bluish-green serpentine dragon figurine about the size of my palm held down a pile of long white feathers.
Three marble pedestals, about chest height stood near a plush, high-backed velvet chair with tall arms. The outermost pedestals each held a rectangular glass box that was about six inches tall and open on the top. The box on the left was full of opal white marbles, and the box on the right was full of smoky black marbles.
The center pedestal had a velvet cloth draped over the flat top. Two of the white marbles rested atop the cushioned fabric and there was an ivory handwritten notecard as well. I took a step closer to read it.
Mem
Or
E’s
I turned away, wondering if it was more of the omegabet or something.
My attention was pulled away by a nearby stack of small animal skeletons and beakers of dried blood resting above unlit burners. Rituals, written in blood, filled pages and pages of scattered papers surrounding the skeletons, like some cheeky practitioner had forgotten to tidy up after their dark sacrifice to Satan.
I shivered, averting my eyes. Whoever lived here didn’t appear to be a help-an-old-lady-cross-the-street type of person, and I was suddenly reminded of the demon Johnathan’s workroom I had discovered what seemed like a lifetime ago. It had been crammed full of notes about Missouri and the influx of beings coming her
e. Was this another such place? Had I found some other member of his demonic terrorist sleeper cell?
I finally shook my head, turning away. I needed to find out where I was before snooping any further. What if the owner was here and walked in on me? If Eae had redirected me here, I was betting the owner wouldn’t be entirely pleased to meet me, because Eae hadn’t been pleased to see me back in that warehouse. He had seen only an enemy. A demon. A fallen brother.
Or…maybe this had nothing to do with Eae. It could be a reaction from trying to travel back to Solomon’s Temple in spite of Roland’s barrier. My breath caught, wondering if I was actually inside Roland’s church. Or maybe Abundant Angel. There were levels below the Shepherd’s church that I had never visited…
All in all, having my method of travel hijacked was not a promising prospect.
It sure didn’t feel like Solomon’s Temple. The stone was different than any I had seen in my brief visit yesterday.
“Dessspaaiiiiiirrrrr,” a voice hissed in a rasp like dried leaves tumbling over brittle twigs.
I jumped instinctively, spinning in the air like a startled kitten.
Chapter 30
I crouched, ready for an attack as my eyes darted back and forth from shadow to shadow, trying to pinpoint the source of the hissing voice.
Despair, it had said. And in the creepiest way possible.
“Hello?” I called out nervously. I jerked my head left and right—even upwards, to check if the voice belonged to someone overlooking the laboratory from a balcony or something. Empty. I licked my lips nervously. “I didn’t mean to—”
Feathers and Fire Series Box Set 2 Page 71
