Morning Star

by Nazri Noor

  As one unit, the four brutish angels grinned madly, then cracked their knuckles. One of their number kept cracking, though, his bones making far too much of a racket, until I realize that the sound was coming from his spine. The angel’s head twisted on his neck, bending in entirely the wrong direction. His final breath left him in a peaceful sigh. Then he came crashing to the ground, like a tree felled in a forest.

  The angel’s death revealed his killer standing behind him, a shorter, certainly skinnier, but arguably stronger adversary for the angels.

  “One down, four to go,” Sterling said, his words faintly muffled by the cigarette dangling from his lips.

  Raguel sprang away from Sterling, which still left him sandwiched between nephilim and vampire. He glanced between us, eyes filled with fury, but I could sense the fear in the lines of his face. “Two abominations to cleanse tonight, then. Again, so be it.”

  The three bodyguard angels turned on Sterling, raising huge, meaty fists as they descended on him. Sterling bobbed and weaved, slipping among their huge bulks as easily as a darting viper. A flash of lightning tore through the night, not with the roar of thunder, but only with a subtle crackle of electricity, like what you’d hear from a live wire.

  Another angel slumped to the ground, joining his severed arm that had crashed onto the asphalt, bleeding out of the stump that Sterling’s katana had made of his shoulder. The blade was a gift from Susanoo, the Japanese god of storm and sea. Sterling flicked his sword against the ground, specks of dark blood spattering the cement as he gestured at the two remaining grunts, taunting.

  “Come at me.”

  I turned my attention to Raguel – rather, I had to, out of necessity, as he brought his own sword crashing down against me, striking with both arms. I lifted my sword to meet it, the clash and scrape of divine steel sounding almost sweet, musical, distinguishing the heaven-forged metal from the mundane. Raguel roared as he struck again and again, and I brought my sword up to meet each of his blows in time, something that only drove him madder with anger.

  Part of my brain was telling me that summoning a shield from the Vestments was the prudent thing to do. Instinctively I knew I couldn’t conjure a full suit of armor, anyway – Raziel did say that I’d scrambled that particular channel in the fight with Skirnir. But any extra protection would have been helpful against Raguel, who was clearly well versed in close combat and had a zealous ferocity to back up his muscle. I’d spent enough time parrying that I knew he was going to get a lucky hit in at some point. Angels could reconstitute themselves when their essences left their husks and returned upstairs.

  As for nephilim – well, I wasn’t planning to find out.

  So I took my shot, bringing my sword around in a sideward slice directed at his throat. The point was to put him on the defensive, to buy myself time so Sterling and I could gang up on him. As I predicted, Raguel brought his sword up to defend himself, meaning to deflect my strike with his blade.

  I did not, however, expect the archangel’s sword to sing through the air, burst into flames, then slice cleanly through Raguel’s sword like it was a stick of elegantly sculpted butter.

  The look of surprise in Raguel’s eyes shortly before I lopped his head off must have matched the shock in mine. His head went sailing from his shoulders, tumbling in midair and landing with a wet, crunchy thud on the asphalt. Dirt and gravel stained the perfection of his face. I yelped in horror as his headless body thudded to the ground. It felt as if I’d just desecrated something holy, killed something beautiful, bringing the full violence of an angel’s weapon against one of their own.

  What truly took me by surprise was how quickly the wave of shock passed, how my blood began to course with jolts of excitement, with the thrill of the kill.

  Yet that too quickly passed as the last of the bodyguard angels turned towards his fallen master, bellowing his name into the dark. Sterling took his chance, driving his katana through the angel’s neck in a single, clean blow, decapitating him with ease. Another head thudded to the ground. Sterling’s katana sizzled and arced with electricity, angel blood dripping from its edge and onto the pavement.

  “Dude,” I sputtered out, finally regaining my breath and my ability to think straight. “That was overkill.”

  Sterling threw his hands up and snarled. “Are you kidding me? I handled the thugs the way minions are supposed to be handled.” He kicked at one of the corpses. “These are expendable.” He thrust his sword towards Raguel’s lifeless head. “And that? That was a precious resource you and I could have tied to a coconut tree and beaten some answers out of. I bet Florian would have enjoyed that. Wait. Where the hell is flower boy, anyway?”

  I scratched my forearm, staring at the still-flaming sword in my clutches. “Yeah, about that. We’ve got a problem.”

  22

  “You should have led with that,” Sterling growled through bared fangs. “Flower boy is in trouble and we wasted our time waving our dicks around with those featherheads.”

  I scowled at him. “News flash. Those featherheads were planning to rip our faces off. We had to do something to defend ourselves. Plus they’re going to regenerate themselves anyhow. No big deal.”

  Sterling scowled back at me. “No big deal. Sure. Just like that huge, flaming sword in your hands is no big deal.”

  I stared dumbly down at the thing, frowning. “I don’t know how to turn it off.”

  “Well, figure it out. It’s like a torch, it is. Bad enough for you to attract human attention with it, I’m sure this whole city will be crawling with angels who want it back. Oh, and to take revenge for that bigger angel you beheaded.”

  I waved the sword around uselessly. “You took out four of them! I just killed the one.”

  I knew from experience that slain angel vessels stuck around just long enough to hopefully inflict their killers with a sense of remorse, being so realistically close to human, at least closer than the husks that the demons liked to use. And it worked, too. That pang of guilt that washed over me when I deactivated Raguel’s husk had been almost overwhelming.

  Still, just like the demons, the husks would eventually break down and return to their home dimensions. That was the one good thing about fighting angels instead of demons. Their corpses didn’t recede into stinking sludge as they decayed, instead turning into wisps of glitter and motes of light as they ascended and returned to the celestial realm.

  Sterling’s eyes burned the same hot orange as the ember on his cigarette, the flame and the motes of angel dust reflecting in them as he took a long, thoughtful puff. “I don’t know how many more times I’m supposed to explain this to you. I killed some entry-level grunts. You killed a supervisor. The board isn’t going to be very happy.”

  He was right about that. I tried not to make it too obvious when I gulped. Great. Just another problem to add to this whole mess of Florian going missing.

  “Forget about that for now,” I said. “We still have to find Florian, and I don’t know where to start. Why the hell is it so easy for demon princes to find you, and now that I want to find Belphegor, it’s so – what is it? What the hell are you staring at?”

  Sterling was gazing just past my head, his eyes huge, his cigarette still burning, but mostly forgotten. In a distant voice, he spoke. “I don’t think we have to look very far.”

  Slowly, I turned on my feet to check out what exactly had Sterling at a rare loss for words. I looked up, and up, and up, and my heart fell into my stomach.

  “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I heard myself mutter.

  Forget the arcane underground, and forget the Veil that every magical person and supernatural being quietly agreed to uphold, despite all our differences and brittle allegiances. Belphegor obviously had no intention of keeping things subtle on his end.

  Growing up along the side of every visible building in Valero, creeping across the streets like a carpet were flowers as blood-red as every plant in Belphegor’s Crimson Gardens. They wavered slo
wly, as if in a gentle breeze, their petals glistening like they’d only just fed on blood. Even as Sterling and I watched, more and more of the flowers grew, sprouting from bare earth, from cracks in the street, blossoming from vines and tendrils that curled up and around lampposts.

  There was once a druid by the name of Deirdre Calloway, a mad cult leader whose dream was to choke the planet with an overgrowth of nature so violent that it would bring buildings crumbling down, rip out modern infrastructure, and revert the earth to a low-tech state, the perfect scenario for her and her crazed nature-worshipping servants. Lucky for Valero and the rest of the world, Deirdre never came even close to succeeding, because the boys of the Boneyard abducted the magical battery she was hoping to abuse to accomplish her insane task. That battery was codenamed the Genesis Codex. Sterling and the others discovered that night that the Codex was not, in fact, an artifact, but a boy named Asher Mayhew, a necromancer, one of my closest and only friends in the entire world.

  This thing Belphegor was trying looked far too much like the overgrowth the druid was planning to pull off, but it all felt so much more sinister. It was clear that the flowers weren’t moving in some silent breeze. I knew from the start that they were doing that on their own, made mobile and carnivorous just like all the other horrible, corrupt creations of Belphegor’s witches and their – ugh – their hagriculture. So that had been the plan all along, to groom Florian to the height of his power, then use him for this. But what was this, exactly? What were the flowers for?

  “We need backup,” Sterling grunted. “Fast. I’ll alert the Boneyard. This isn’t a job for two people. You work with your contacts, anyone you can muster. This has to be stopped.”

  I nodded at Sterling, my heart thumping as he stepped closer and clamped a strong, reassuring hand on my shoulder. “We might not see each other again tonight. This clusterfuck looks like it’s growing all over the city, and we have to tackle it on a large scale. But wherever you end up, know that I’m fighting with you. We all are.”

  I nodded again. “Thanks,” I breathed.

  “Always.” Sterling’s fingers dug into my clavicles, this time with more harshness than reassurance. “And Mason? Give Asher a fucking call, will you?”

  Again I nodded, just in time to watch Sterling turn into a blur of silver and black, his vampire speed taking over as he sprinted off to summon the boys of the Boneyard.

  For a scant few moments more, I stood there watching in horror as the grotesque carpet of bloody flowers continued to infest the city. In the distance, sirens and the panicked cries of the normals, of Valero’s civilian population, pierced the bizarre tranquility of the night.

  The flames from the archangel’s sword had finally died down, receding enough to leave just its gleaming golden blade. At least I didn’t have to worry about being accosted for carrying around a weapon anymore. The authorities obviously had way bigger problems just then.

  I searched through my pockets, my free hand shaking as it found the one thing that could possibly be more useful than a cellphone in my situation. My chest flooded with relief when my fingers brushed against the arrowhead that Artemis had once given me, what she’d explained was the best way for me to get in touch. I squeezed it, relishing how its sharp edges dug into my skin. The pain meant it was working.

  Artemis’s voice echoed from a pale distance, tumbling around the inside of my head. “Hello? Mason? Is that you? I gave you this number in case of emergency. This had better be good.”

  I answered her with my thoughts, hoping my tone would relay the gravity of our predicament.

  “Oh, this is an emergency, all right. Florian’s in trouble. Demon prince levels of trouble.”

  I heard a click in my head, just like Artemis had hung up, and a shaft of moonlight pierced the night sky, touching down on the asphalt not one foot away from me. She materialized in its spotlight, her forehead already furrowed, bow in one hand, arrow in the other.

  “Where is my big dumb baby boy? Who took him? I’m going to rip their – oh. Oh no.”

  She looked out onto the city, her breath catching in her throat, shoulders visibly slumping.

  “Yeah,” Artemis said. “This is definitely a problem.”

  23

  My lungs struggled for air as I sprinted through the streets, the goddess of the moon and the hunt at my side. By that point we were well past caring about the Veil, and besides, California? No one really bats an eyelash if you see a woman walking the streets in a toga and sandals with a bow and arrow strapped to her back. Chances are, there’s a fantasy convention in town.

  Box was a different matter entirely, though. We needed all the help we could get, and if that meant having backup in the form of a sentient little treasure chest with the personality of a loyal dog and the appetite of a half-starved dinosaur, then so be it. Chips of asphalt flew as Box’s wooden undercarriage smashed at the street with every bounding leap. If we survived this, maybe I could teach him a thing or two about growing a pair of legs.

  Where we were headed to, though, was anybody’s guess. There was no sign of Belphegor and his three hags – worse, no sign of Florian. But the slow, creeping spread of the carpet of flowers had to mean that they were at the center of it all, and as completely dangerous as it sounded, the center was where we needed to go. That was starting to look very much like Central Square, of all places, the city’s geographic heart, and incidentally, the stomping grounds for the Valero chapter of the Lorica.

  That, at least, explained the clutch of mages already actively patrolling the streets. Hands attacked the overgrowth of crimson flowers, blasting magic from their bare fingers. Scions barked commands and instructions as they contributed their own powerful magics. Yet even with twenty or so mages at work, there was no stopping the tide of flowers. They kept on growing, and growing, and growing.

  I skidded to a halt, just at the same time that Artemis did. She looked down at her feet, trampling a bunch of the blooms under one sandaled foot, then glowering at the ground as she found them multiplying again. I could have been imagining things, but it looked to me as if three more flowers blossomed for every one that she’d stomped. Nearby, Box snuffled as he snapped and chomped at every petal in reach. I couldn’t tell if he was helping or hurting.

  “This is a nightmare,” I muttered, my chest heaving as my body strained to recover from our run. “The Lorica’s out in full force and they’re barely getting anything under control. This is a damn nightmare.”

  “Oh, really? You think so?” Artemis snarled as she kicked at another cluster of flowers, cursing under her breath as those, too, grew and multiplied with the deaths of their forebears. “Let’s forget that I’m a totally vulnerable actual goddess out in your reality for a second and think about this. How the hell are we supposed to fight this – whatever the hell all this garbage is?”

  My hand shook as I ran it through my hair, as I searched Central Square wildly for any sign of the Prince of Sloth. Where the hell could he be hiding?

  I had to thank the last of my fraying nerves for keeping my limbs in control, at least, because a hand tapped me on the shoulder just then. If I’d been a tad more unhinged, a little more impulsive, just like the sword in my hand kept telling me to be, I would have spun around in an arc and drawn a circle through the air with its edge.

  Instead I whirled on my feet, eyes huge and mad, looking fully insane, I assumed, when I came face to face with Maharani.

  “Mr. Albrecht. You’ve come.”

  I nodded hurriedly. “My friend. Florian, you met him at Beatrice’s place. He’s hurt, and he’s being used for this. Belphegor corrupted him somehow, controlled his mind, and together they’re making all this happen.”

  “We put together as much,” she said, nodding.

  “You have to help him. Couldn’t you, I don’t know, stop time?”

  Maharani shook her head. “Not on this scale, no. The strain would simply kill me.” She clasped me by the shoulder, her fingers delicate, but stro
ng as they pressed reassuringly. “It’s all right, Mason. Florian, we’re going to find him, and we’re going to help him.” Her eyes flitted past me just then, and it was just the kind of pithy, noncommittal expression that told me she was probably only saying what I was hoping to hear.

  Carefully, I took her hand off my shoulder, then shook my head. “I know what you’re thinking, that we’re going to have to kill him if it comes down to it. I’ll tell you right now that I’m not going to let that happen.”

  Rani’s eyes kept focusing on a point just past my shoulder, long enough that I knew she was trying to communicate something with her gaze. I spun on my feet again, this time even more surprised to come face to chest with another of their number, a tall, scruffy man in a brown trench coat who clearly smoked too many cigarettes and didn’t get enough sleep.

  “You know how this works, Mason,” the man said. “The Lorica is about saving both the mundane and magical communities at large, and if that means nipping the problem in the bud – pardon the pun – then that’s exactly what we’ll have to do.”

  I gritted my teeth as I forced out as polite an answer as I could muster. “Hello, Royce. Good to see you again.”

  Royce was also a Scion, someone I’d met through my friends at the Boneyard, as hard an ass as hard-asses came in the arcane underground. He was a Mouth and a Wing, which meant he wielded the powers of both telepathy and teleportation. It made him the ideal candidate for heading the Lorica’s PR department. Royce was all about damage control. Unfortunately, he was also all about taking the most direct route. If that meant smashing the problem to smithereens with a blunt instrument, then so be it.

  He shook his head. “I wish we could have met again under more casual circumstances, but this is life in the underground, eh? One fucking disaster after the other.” He ran his fingers through his hair, his other hand already fumbling in his pocket for a pack of cigarettes. “Christ. Cleaning this up and making the normals forget it ever happened is going to be a nightmare.”