Conspiracy of Angels (34 page)

Finally—a fight I could hope to win.

As the living shadows closed around, I slashed the air with blades of searing light. One of the creatures shrilled as I connected, and I pinned it against the deck, tearing viciously at its central mass. Clinging globules of dark scattered like blood across my vision as the thing writhed, and then dispersed, its rasping death cry echoing through the corridors of my mind.

Charging a second, I seized it in hands aglow with spirit-fire. It writhed and lashed, coiling its tail around my ankle. Stinging appendages sought to drag its gnashing maw closer to my face. I wrestled with it for several moments, spinning and twisting as I sought to keep it from getting those jagged teeth into me.

It worked to pull my legs out from under me. I kept my feet, planting them a shoulder-width apart, then drew back a hand to once again call the brilliant blade. With a thunderous cry, I drove the diamond-bright weapon of focused will straight into what served the thing for a heart. I dropped its writhing carcass to the deck, shaking out my tingling fingers as the shadow-thing dispersed.

Another of the creeping horrors hissed a challenge, swooping up and around in an attempt to dive behind me. It raked my wings with half a dozen of its scythe-like claws. Staggered, I let out a coughing cry of agony.

The cacodaimon took advantage of the lapse in my attention and made another scathing pass, whipping around to slam its toothsome jaw into the middle of my back. The armor of my leather protected me from the worst of it, but the impact sent me reeling. Waves of numbing cold shot through my shoulders and arms, so intense I couldn’t even catch myself when I fell. I smacked my chin painfully on the deck and saw stars. The thing clung to my back, lacerating my wings and legs where the jacket provided no cover.

I started screaming.

For every jolt of bone-searing cold, I knew it sank another appendage into me. It would eat me if I couldn’t get it off of me. I flailed uselessly, but couldn’t seize hold of it. The angle was all wrong.

A fourth cacodaimon started circling.

I heard gunshots, more explosions.

I panicked, knowing Dorimiel had to be closing in, but I couldn’t fight past the creeping numbness stealing the life from me.

Somewhere in the midst of the chill and the pain, I became aware of another chittering cry. For a minute, I thought it was yet another cacodaimon, coming to make a meal of me—but it didn’t sound quite right. Looking wildly around, I spotted one of Lil’s little beasts, doing some kind of angry ferret dance as it squeaked a challenge at the cacodaimon. Maybe it was trying to work up its courage before striking. Under less dire circumstances, it might have seemed comical.

As it was, I found myself staring, too muddled by pain to muster a coherent response.

Then the spirit-ferret launched itself at the cacodaimon on my back, a wriggling projectile of teeth and blonde fur. The sound of the little beast’s war cry dredged a brief flash from childhood memory. A name—Rikki Tikki Tavi. That was a mongoose. This was a ferret, but the effect was the same.

With an angry hiss, the bold critter sank its teeth into the rubbery meat at the base of the cacodaimon’s flaring hood. The tenacious little bugger was still clinging to that spot when the cacodaimon reared back, pulling half out of me. It shrieked and tried to shake the ferret off, unsuccessfully.

The misbegotten spawn of shadows didn’t detach itself from my legs, but by then it didn’t have to. It moved enough for me to throw my shoulders back and grab onto its central mass. Digging my fingers into the meat of the thing, I brought a nimbus of blue-white fire to my hands.

With a furious cry, I tore it away like the leech it was, whipping it around to face me. It scrabbled against the front of my jacket, seeking some kind of purchase, but before it could work its way around or through the leather, I intoned the syllables of my name, lashing out and sundering it at the core.

The ferret wisely dashed to safety at the last possible instant.

“Two down,” I gasped, my head, wings, and legs throbbing. “No, three. How many more could be out there?”

I knelt for a few heartbeats, struggling to catch my breath. The fourth cacodaimon continued circling. I still didn’t see Dorimiel anywhere, and that worried me.

A fifth squirming nightmare slunk onto the ship. It hugged the deck, skittering toward the man Dorimiel had eaten. The chitinous horror quested around the fallen man’s form, moving sinuously along the curve of his shoulders and spine. For a minute, it looked for all the world like it was spooning him—then it slid right into his body, as if he were an empty suit of clothes.

The guy lumbered to his feet, shambling in a circle as the cacodaimon tested out his nerves. I wanted to be sick all over my boots, but there really wasn’t time. Even as the not-quite-dead man staggered toward where Remy and Sal still struggled with Jubiel, the nearest creature slashed at me. I threw up my hands in defense, and it raised angry welts on my wrists and palms.

Two more were calling in the distance. I was already worn pretty thin—if those joined the fight it wasn’t going to be pretty.

Where the hell is Lil?
I wondered.

As I pinned the fourth cacodaimon to the deck and dragged my blades through its clammy flesh, the ferret shrieked a warning, then danced away in haste. I reacted a moment too late.

A vise-like hand seized the shoulder of my biker jacket. Pallid green eyes agleam, Dorimiel lifted me bodily to my feet. He called power to his twisted hand, and I finally got to see what was wrong with it. His fingers were blackened and warped, the skin shrunk tight against the bones. Dark veins ran up his arm to the elbow, pulsing visibly against his discolored flesh. Each finger was tipped with a scythe-like claw. The shape was unnervingly familiar—alien, insectile—

“You ate one of them,” I choked as he twisted me around to face him. “You ate a fucking cacodaimon.”

Dorimiel loomed over me, easily as tall as Saliriel, if not a little taller. A wild light gleamed in his poisonous eyes, manic and completely unhinged. He gave a smile that made gooseflesh flee down my spine.

“He was a messenger. I misunderstood. I tried to destroy him, but he transformed me. It was glorious.” Leering scant inches from my face, he hissed, “I’ll make you a part of me, too, Anakim. Then you’ll see.”

He lifted his tainted hand, the darkness throbbing around his clawed fingers. An answering pulse leapt to life beneath the thin fabric of his shirt—red, not black. I didn’t need to see the jewel to know it was the Eye. With his normal hand, he seized the front of my jacket, seeking to hold me in place as he prepared to feed.

I shouted my power, blue-white flames flaring round my hands and chasing away at least some of the cloying shadows. With the chill of his fingers just inches from my face, I slashed the blades with desperate fury.

He was ridiculously stronger than me. I managed to land a glancing blow, and at least I got him to let go of me, but his counterattack was swift and terrible. I found myself quickly on the defensive, and it was all I could to do keep him from laying his deadly hands on me.

“The last time you were here, you fought with equal fervor,” he sneered, “but you know how well that ended.” Landing a flurry of punches, he added, “Hand over the Stylus and reveal the jars. Make things easy on yourself.”

“You have a fucked-up definition of easy,” I snarled, fending off blow after blow.

“Tell me and I shall kill you quickly,” he offered. “I’ll rip it from you either way.” Then he moved methodically forward, and I realized he was herding me—the lashed-down pile of crates was perhaps ten feet behind me.

I’d strayed pretty far in my struggles with the cacodaimons. Where before the crates had provided cover, now they were an obstacle against which he could pin me. I didn’t like that idea. I intoned the resonate syllables of my name till the twin blades of power gleamed bright as magnesium.

Spitting curses in a language still strange to me, I dove forward, slashing viciously, but he sidestepped every blow.

“You have no hope to free them,” he taunted. “Only I know the phrases that serve as lock and key. You’ll never get them from me.”

I drove my blades at him, but I was losing. Badly. The light that glimmered around the spirit-daggers sputtered, growing dim. I couldn’t keep this up.

“Once I’ve emptied you, I’ll bind the tatters of your soul with your lady,” he threatened, patting a bulge in the pocket of his vest. “I had her screaming near the end.”

He pressed forward, his tainted fingers grazing my cheek. They stung with the same numbing cold of a cacodaimon’s claws. He cackled wildly at my pained reaction.

“Last chance for a quick death, Anakim.”

“My name,” I bellowed with all the strength I had left, “is
Zaquiel
!”

I used the power of that Name to carry me forward in one last and desperate assault. I managed to connect this time, slamming my blades into his chest, but it seemed like all it did was knock the wind out of him. At least he stumbled backward. We grappled, but somehow I ended up on the losing end, pinned on the deck beneath him within sight of the crates. I wrestled weakly, working to get his back to them.

“You know what would be great about now?” I shouted desperately. “A little help here. Remy? Lil? Sal?”

The shadow-tainted Nephilim sneered nastily, exposing yellowed fangs. “Not so valiant now, are we?” He shifted his weight, pinning my legs with his knee even as I struggled to bring them up, kicking. Usually someone my size had height and reach to his advantage, but not against Dorimiel. He was close to a foot taller than me.

“You’ve earned your suffering,” he promised. “You and all your tribe. I can bring an end to your atrocities. With my new and hungry brothers, we will feed you to the void.”

His eyes bled briefly from green to black, and it was like staring into the pitiless vacuum of space. I fought to grab his wrists and at least keep his hands away, but between his superior strength and my growing exhaustion it was a token effort at best.

“Shut up and get it over with,” I cried. My strength was spent.

His sneer broadened and he wrapped his hand around my throat. The black film on his eyes cleared, and they flared poison green again. I thought—ridiculously—that the color reminded me of pistachio ice cream. I cackled hysterically… then I felt his power burning coldly around his fingertips. Those inky tendrils took physical shape and slithered against my skin.

My laughter turned to screams.

The Eye pulsed above me, its power twining through the veins of darkness that ridged his arm. The pain quickly eclipsed all conscious thought, and I became a mute and unwilling witness to a parade of memories flashing with rapid-fire speed through my mind. Things I didn’t even realize I still remembered—pictures from childhood, images of the museum, a weathered, ancient statue which, in that moment, I knew to be the true face of the Rephaim Terael.

That blinding power riffled through the files of my mind, upending everything. Each page or photograph flashed once, brilliantly, before crumbling to ash. Dorimiel drove images of the jars at me, returning again and again to memories that were linked with them.

The third line of the cipher flashed past—

Gandhi guards my brothers.

—but nothing useful followed it. The Nephilim’s frustration shook the very pillars of my mind. Maybe it lasted only a minute. Maybe the space of a few heartbeats, but it was long enough.

Too long.

I made myself hoarse with screaming.

Then suddenly, it halted. My vision—red and ragged around the edges—returned to the here-and-now. I saw the Nephilim above me, and fumbled for his name. Then behind him, another face. Fiercely beautiful. Russet hair spilling everywhere. And two eyes like thunder.

“I knew I could count on you for a distraction,” Lil said.

Then she slit his throat all the way down to the bone.

D
orimiel’s blood fountained over me—and with it, a backwash of memory. I choked on it even as snapshots of recollection popped like flashbulbs in my mind. They flew by in a rush, nothing in order, all too rapid to clearly identify. I lay there stunned for a moment, astounded simply by the fact that I
could
think.

Above me, Lil grappled with Dorimiel. The dancing flames that burned across the deck cast weird shadows on both of them, though maybe that was my still hazy vision. I wasn’t a drooling idiot by any means, but it still felt like someone had introduced a blender to my brain.

Incredibly, Dorimiel still put up a fight. It was ghastly, especially from this perspective, because his neck had a wide and gaping smile which opened like a second mouth every time he struggled against Lil. He scrabbled with one hand, working to hold the edges of the wound shut. As he did so, I could see the lips of the laceration knitting.

Lil clung to his back like a red-haired fury, the ice pick clenched between her teeth. She kept trying to get him into a hold so she could apply it properly. I wondered if thrusting it into the base of Dorimiel’s brain would make a corpse of the shadow-tainted monster.

I didn’t get a chance to find out. The minute he realized he might actually be losing, the decimus twisted nimbly out of Lil’s grip, leaving her startled and still holding his singed and bloody tactical vest. Then he did something neither of us could have expected of a Nephilim.

He stepped through to the Shadowside.

“Bleeding Mother!” she swore.

“Lailah,” I croaked, gesturing at the vest. “Upper right pocket.”

Fury and relief vied upon her features as she retrieved the vessel holding Lailah’s bound spirit—but it counted for nothing without the sigil’s key.

I levered myself to my feet, feeling something slide heavily off the front of my jacket. It clattered onto the deck and I stared at it blankly for several heartbeats, hardly able to process what I was seeing. An amulet of thick and blood-smeared gold winked up at me, the leather thong that had fixed it round Dorimiel’s neck sliced as cleanly as his throat.