by Abby Knox
“If the whore is pregnant with an immortal’s child, then we know what broke the seal. A Seer mated with a half breed, breaking the curse, and breaking the seal. Congratulations to the happy couple. Enjoy your Armageddon honeymoon.”
Something changed, then, in Ada’s eyes. It was a metamorphosis of sorts. Not entirely physical, but in spirit. He felt all fear drain out of her. Samuel could not tell if it was a mama bear instinct or what, but he could not deny she was suddenly glowing with something beyond simple human pregnancy hormones.
She pointed at the archangel, and Samuel knew this time not to try to keep her at bay. “You listen to me, Chuckles,” she said. “Here’s what’s going to happen. You say this seal is down by the river, on the outcropping where those drownings happened in 1901, is that correct?”
Samuel expected Michael to be insulted, but oddly, he was listening.
“Yes,” Michael said.
“Good,” Ada replied. “Then I’ll make it easy for you. We’ll go down there and fight them off before it begins. We can pick the demons off one by one.”
Samuel whispered, “Little fox, you don’t know what you’re asking for.”
“Good! Perfect! Let’s do it!”
Samuel turned on the archangel who was descending back to the ground, putting his sword away as Samuel put his hand on his hilt. “No! We’re not doing that. I won’t leave her side!”
The archangel shook his head. “Oh, no. She’s coming with us. It was her idea. You can keep your eyes on your precious. See? Best of both worlds.”
Samuel turned back to Ada and whispered, “Don’t you see what you’re doing? He’s going to push you in. Offer you up to the demons!”
Ada smiled at him and cupped his chin with her hand. With her other hand, she traced his scar. “Did Michael do this to you?”
Samuel shook his head no. “It happened during the chaos of the great Discord event. I’ve tried to go back and remember how it happened but the exact memory eludes me. Likely it was one of my brothers. Why do you bring this up now, love?”
“Didn’t kill you, did it? It made you stronger, did it not?”
Samuel nodded. “Not to get metaphysical about it, but it did improve my combat skills after that. They aren’t my strongest suit.”
“Then you’ll have to trust me that this, too, will be for the greater good, no matter what happens. I’m ready.”
“No!” he seethed.
But she could not reply, because the archangel had her, having snatched her silently and sprinting Ada away before they had even had time to hatch a plan.
Samuel roared at the heavens, flew to the sky like a rocket, his sword drawn. His brothers followed. Samuel was not their leader, but he was today.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Ada
All seven Nephilim crashed into each other as they all teleported and reemerged at the same moment.
It would have been comical if the situation wasn’t so dire, Ada thought.
Archangels being much faster at teleporting than Nephilim, she and Michael had arrived moments earlier at the edge of the river. The leering statue that had greeted her at the bottom of the bridge, overlooking the outcropping on the river, was gone.
Ada could not tell how much time had passed between the end of the Appalachian Folklore Festival and today. Could have been days, could have been years. She would spend more time later trying to account for how many days she’d spent on the mountaintop. Now, other matters were much more pressing.
They all gathered at the foot of the mountain, on a treeless clearing that overlooked the river. A short drop down from the outcropping, the wide river rushed by, not half as calm as it had been on the day that Ada had stuck her feet in it while eating carnival food. She shuddered to think what could have floated downriver from here, at the supposed location of a gateway to hell. What if a rogue demon had been swimming past her toes or Emmeline’s? How would everything be different today?
She peered down into the water and nothing was unusual. It looked like an ordinary river. No demon hordes here.
“We meet again, Cherry.”
All the skin on Ada’s body crawled. She swung around and there, on the edge of the river, stood the skeeve who had invited her to hunt for Giants in the first place. But then she remembered she was accompanied by an archangel and seven Nephilim with flaming swords, so her fear dissipated quickly. Granted, Michael would be totally fine with her dying and all, but who was she to split hairs?
“Jake, what are you doing here?”
“Looking for you,” he said, sounding strangely unalarmed. “You flew away after that snake bite, and I wanted to make sure you were OK. You’ve been missing for like two weeks.”
The math didn’t add up in her head, but neither did it make sense that he was still there. “And you’re here, still looking for me? Isn’t that best left up to the forest service?” But wait…her memory was coming back. Panic flooded her. “How did you know about the snake bite?”
She also wondered why Jake wasn’t running in fright at the sight of the white, flaming archangel that had her in its grip.
Jake lifted one shoulder and said, “I have bigger fish to fry.”
It was then that the whispers came into Ada’s mind. They started inside her head. Gods dammit, she would murder Samuel and the brothers if they dared press into her mind again. But it wasn’t Samuel’s voice or that of any of the other Nephilim. They were human voices. Voices of the dead.
She turned her head and swallowed down her initial fear. Behind her, coming up out of the dark river water, was a woman dressed in an old-fashioned Edwardian-style dress. And then another one. Followed by a man. Old, young, teens, children, of all backgrounds but all seeming to be of the same period, were crowded on the clearing above the water. And all of them were staring at her.
She spoke to them with her mind. Spirits of the dead had spoken to her in the past, on those rare investigations that proved to be real ghost hauntings. Never had so many at one time, in one place, crowded in on her. Her mind searched to find the one to speak to without interference from the angels but she couldn’t find the channel. The presence of an archangel meant the channels were completely overwhelmed.
“It’s all right,” the whisper said. “Don’t try to talk. We’ll talk to you. He’s a demon.”
The goosebumps and the chill that went through Ada’s body was difficult to hide. She turned back to Jake, and she saw it. Something was wrong with him.
“What’s happened to your eyes?” she said in a strangled voice.
Jake smiled at her, and that’s when she saw it. He released a set of fangs from his canine teeth, and his irises went completely white. White liquid sprayed from his fangs, and Ada had to hold back the scream. Instinctively she covered her abdomen with both hands. “It was you? You were the snake?”
Jake rubbed the front of his shirt, “Only way to travel undetected is to stay on your belly. Not to mention, snakes do tend to have a great sense of smell. I almost found you.”
“Fuckity-fuck,” Samuel yelled as he wrested her away from Michael’s hold.
Michael, mercifully, didn’t fight back.
Samuel pushed her behind him and pointed his sword at Jake. “Stay back!”
Michael made a noise that drowned out everything around her. The birds went silent. The water of the river, if she wasn’t mistaken, even slowed down. All of nature was watching this play out.
Ada broke the silence. “What do you want, Jake?”
“Funny you should ask that now,” he answered, flashing his fangs. “I brought you up here to get you pregnant for Lucifer.”
Ada, for the first time in her life, despite having a million questions, stayed silent and listened to the spirits that surrounded her.
Her whole life, she had heard the name Lucifer and thought it was part of the myth of angels and demons. But now that her entire world had been turned upside down? Lucifer was real? Why not?
Samuel gripped her
close and faced off with the demon. “What does that mean?” he shouted.
“Only what I just said. Lucifer needed me to spawn a half-human/half-demon child to break the first seal. But we’ll take a half-human, half Giant. That’ll make for an even more impressive Antichrist to rise up and bring people over to the dark side.”
“Not going to happen,” Samuel growled.
Jake dug around in his pocket as he sailed lightly back to earth. “Oh. And…” He pulled something out and held it up. It was Ada’s phone.
Shit.
“Found your phone. You know, Lucifer promised me a throne, unlimited concubines, a palace made of the bones of my enemies. All of that, on top of this shape-shifting thing he let me try out? I mean, the guy is pretty fuckin’ dope. That’s all great, but this,” he said, teasingly waving the phone in the air. “This contains the icing on the cake. I’ll be more famous than any scientist in all of human history because I will have discovered that angels exist, Nephilim exist, demons exist. You did good work, Cherry. You collected all the data, even explained all the revised history that The Authorities didn’t want humans to know. I’m gonna be bigger than Einstein.”
Ada glowered at him but controlled her temper. Samuel, however, did not. “You’re not a scientist, you freak!”
Jake cackled again. “People don’t care whether I am or not, they’ll believe whatever I say because, hello! Demons don’t need mind control like angels; they need one guy with a platform to say things into a microphone for everyone to believe it.” Turning to Ada, he said, “Oh yeah, I looked at all your shit. Handy being possessed by demons, it gives one the ability to hack through even the most complicated systems of codes and encrypted files.”
“Son of a bitch,” Zave exhaled.
Jake gestured at Ada and winked. “You’re good, Cherry. You’re real careful. I like that. Using passcodes based on the music in your head. Too bad you did that. Once I cracked it and figured out what it was, that too was a major discovery. Now the demon world has access to all of the Angel communication channels too. Fuck, the demons could win Armageddon in the seventh inning!”
Stay calm. Demons feed off human emotions. Don’t feed him, whatever you do, said the ghost voices in her head.
Ada fought back the rage.
Samuel slashed at the demon, but the demon suddenly levitated above the ground, without wings.
“You can’t touch me, Nephilim half breed!” The demon cackled. “You are powerless against the prince of all the angels!”
Samuel screamed, “Michael. You’re not powerless! You can kill him! Take him down, now!”
The demon laughed again and flipped in the air in insidious mirth. “But he won’t! Tell them, Michael.”
Zave approached and got right up in Michael’s face. The archangel remained on the ground while Samuel flew in the air and continued to swipe fruitlessly at the demon.
“Why can’t you end the demon? Do it now! What are you waiting for?”
Michael looked down. The Nephilim all flew to him, half of them aiming their swords at Michael and the other half at the demon.
“The sacrifice is the only thing that will slow down the End of Days, but if we sacrifice the woman and child, Lucifer will take the soul of the child and use it to raise the antichrist in some other vessel,” Michael muttered. He looked up at Samuel. “It seems we’re at an impasse.”
Michael lowered his sword, and everything happened at once.
The whispers in her head became more urgent. A woman’s voice told Ada, “He’s not a demon yet. He’s only a possessed human. He’s frightening but he’s only a meat suit. If you let us help you, we can take him down.”
Ada turned and faced the ghosts who watched her and nodded to the one who was in charge. She closed her eyes, and she let the souls of a hundred dead, innocent human souls enter her body as seven Nephilim Giants ascended at the demon, flaming swords slashing at the head, arms, and legs.
The spirits entered her, and finally, she could speak back to them. “What do I do?” she asked.
“You do nothing,” said a hundred voices at once inside her head. “We take him to hell.”
Ada’s mind scrambled. “Wait! No! What will happen to you? Where will you go? You’re not supposed to go there!”
The voices replied, “There’s no time, Ada! Let go!”
As soon as Samuel let go of her, Ada levitated and let go of her control. He should have expected Ada was up to something. But even if he had known, he never expected her to fly without wings.
Nobody was expecting it.
Ada flew at Jake so fast, it looked like she was possessed by demons.
The human side of Jake was so shocked that he stopped taunting the Nephilim. And it was enough shock to buy Samuel time to slice off his head with his mighty angelic sword, sending a riot of violet sparks through the dimming light.
The scream was otherworldly. The demonic spirit, like a black cloud of smoke, hung in the air like it was stunned for half a second. Jake’s head tumbled to the ground and landed with a thud, and then rolled off the cliff. His body plunged to the ground and laid there at an odd, splintered angle. Ada watched as the head plopped into the water, bobbed up once, revealing Jake’s final human expression of confusion, and then sank below the surface of the water.
Ada opened her mouth at the will of the spirits that had ahold of her, and she let them speak. All at once, they spoke in unison, an incantation in Latin that echoed across the water and bounced off the hills all around them. At their will, she reached out and felt the demon in her grip. Holy shit. She was not in charge of her faculties, but she had a voice and she had power.
She panicked when her mind played out this scenario, as the demon struggled against her grasp. “Don’t worry, we won’t take you with us. You’re safe.”
Tears leaked from Ada’s eyes as she watched herself twist the demon into a ball and felt herself float above the water. More incantations followed, and soon the water parted, revealing a gaping hole in the muck of the river bottom. The screaming of suffering souls and the rejoicing of thousands of evil spirits obliterated all other sounds. This was the gate to hell. She hovered, face down, above the seal, reared back, and hurled the demon spirit into it.
Then, the spirits began to leave her body, one by one, to drag the demon back to its proper place. She understood; they were reversing the flow, temporarily. The spirits of the dead were buying them time until the demons were able to get past them to come out of their prison and walk the earth.
Soon, all the spirits would be free of her body, though. And then what? Would she, too, fall in through the portal to Hell?
Part of her brain tried to compel her to scream, but she could not. She had relinquished control of her body and voice to the spirits. There was nothing she could do.
Well, she thought. It’s been a good ride.
Chapter Thirty
Samuel
“The Authorities would like a word, Michael.”
The archangel Gabriel stood before the group gathered at the outcropping. He was the same frightening size and stature as Michael but had a far less combative and threatening appearance than his compatriot.
Michael hissed, “It wasn’t supposed to go this way. The prophecies…”
Gabriel rested a hand on Michael’s shoulder and spoke softly. “The prophecies only work insofar as humans aren’t involved. Free will and all that. It changes everything.”
Before Gabriel escorted Michael back to heaven, he turned and nodded at Samuel.
The look on Gabriel’s face pained him; Samuel knew the archangel was still sick over the role he’d played eons ago when sparking the Discord that could have ended the race of the Nephilim. Gabriel was the most compassionate to all humans, including half-humans.
“Take care of her,” Gabriel said. “And the baby. You must leave, quickly. They are coming.”
Panic rose in Samuel’s throat. “Who is coming?”
Gabriel swallowed and l
ooked at Michael, whose stern expression did nothing to dissuade what Gabriel said next. “You…you killed a human. A human possessed by a demon, yes. Perhaps justified, but…it’s enough that The Authorities are… unhappy. Raphael’s army is coming to collect you…and your child.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
Before Gabriel and Michael vanished in a wisp of air, Gabriel replied, “Because I owe you a head start.”
The wind suddenly increased. Ada’s hand gripped his forearm. He opened his eyes to her pointing to the sky as they floated. “Samuel. What’s happening? The sky is bright white but a second ago we were looking at the sunset?”
Samuel covered Ada’s hand with his and looked up.
“You boys had better get back to the abbey and send your companions on home. I would suggest teleporting. You’ve all got five minutes, I would wager,” he instructed.
Zave approached him. “What about you?”
The pink and orange clouds had been replaced by a bright white light punching a hole in the sky. And from that gap, something terrifying and familiar emerged.
“I can’t tell you where we’re going, but I’m taking her somewhere safe.”
“The way station?” Zave said.
Samuel nodded his head but said, “No. And don’t endanger yourself further by continuing this conversation. Go!”
For the first time, Zave took an order from Samuel, and the six brothers teleported themselves away.
Samuel trained his eyes on Ada to make sure she was OK. He had snatched her from the air as the last of the spirits had left her body. She should not have put herself in danger like that, but she had done well.
“I’m so proud of you, my little fox. But we have to move.”
Samuel pulled Ada tight against him. “I can’t teleport. It uses too much bandwidth on the channels, and they can too easily track us. We’ll have to fly. But do not be afraid.”
Ada smiled and tucked herself close to his chest.
