Conspiracy of Angels (7 page)

Then I saw what was pulling his strings.

In some way that wasn’t physical, I saw a shadow so black it seemed to drink up the light. It clung to his shoulders and back. Something that might have served it for a head was curled over the dead officer’s balding pate. For the space of a few heartbeats, I thought I was seeing things—but then it looked at me, and I knew with a certainty as nauseating as it was absolute that this nightmare-creature was aware that I had noticed it. It turned its impossible eyes to notice me right back.

Black and completely featureless, it was like a living shadow shaped vaguely like a manta ray. The only thing shining from the light-swallowing depths of its form were two glaring eyes of murderous red, and then I swore I saw it flash a razor-edged smile, all glittering silver and death.

As I gawked at his rider, the cop squeezed off another round from his gun. With me absent from the space I had previously occupied, the gun was aimed at Saliriel, but her two collared slaves had sprung to life from the back of the room the minute a threat was imminent. Naked as they were, their response wasn’t to scream in terror or run for their lives. Instead, they threw themselves in front of my towering sibling, shielding her pale, leggy form as much as they could with their own bodies.

Her male slave took the bullet. It was a lucky shot—or really unlucky, depending on how you looked at it. It caught him in the face, just over one cheekbone. His eye and the entire side of his head exploded in a spray of bone, brains, and blood. Saliriel and the naked woman were painted with it.

The woman seemed too stunned to do more than stand there blinking. Saliriel howled with fury, gore dripping from her shiny white vinyl. Her voice held such raw, animal power that I expected the ceiling tiles to rattle with it. And then, despite the clinging arms of her female companion, Saliriel did the unexpected—she launched herself at the gun-toting attackers, snarling something in a language that certainly wasn’t English. It communicated her intentions all the same.

The second cop—the young black woman who had looked so stricken at shooting my pursuer—shambled around her partner, gun at the ready. One side of her face was a bruised and bloody mess and I saw purpling handprints around her throat—as if someone had seized her by the neck and pounded her head against some unforgiving surface. In saving my own skin, I had left both these people to die.

The certainty of it paralyzed me.

The same kind of dark shadow-form clung to her back. It had something like arms, but they were thrust
into
her, working her limbs like a puppet. I felt a stomach-churning sense of wrongness as it twitched and wriggled to make her body respond. This one seemed to be having more trouble, probably because of the head trauma, and the shot from the lady cop’s gun went wild, burying itself in the far wall.

Saliriel dodged left and right, a blond-maned blur. Both cops swung their guns unsteadily, trying to keep a bead on her, but she was too fast for their zombified nervous systems. In another moment she leapt over the fallen bouncer, practically crawling up the front of the older cop’s body. She wrapped her legs around his midsection and snatched at his gun, the rhinestones in her manicure flashing. I had a sudden thought of her breaking a nail, and cackled madly. Pressed against the wall beside me, I felt more than I heard Remy hiss my name—not Zachary. The other one.

That snapped me out of it, though I couldn’t shake the icy feeling that those horrible shadow-rays were looking at me.

“What
are
they?” I choked.

“Zombies,” Remy whispered. “Something has to be riding them.”

“Yeah. I see that. What the fuck are they?”

Saliriel’s bellow thundered through the room as she wrestled with the dead officer. She disarmed the older cop almost literally, wrenching the weapon from his hand with such force that both bones of his forearm snapped wetly. His hand went limp and he flailed at her. She slashed at his eyes, forcing him to the ground under her weight.

The lady cop tried for Saliriel again but instead fired into her partner. This didn’t seem to bother him much, and he kept smacking at Saliriel with his useless limb.

The naked woman who served Saliriel recovered from the shock of getting covered with her male counterpart’s gray matter. She ran to her mistress’s side, then grabbed the gun from where it had clattered across the tiles and, reasonably, tried to deal with the female officer by shooting her in the head.

It was pretty much a point-blank shot. The collared submissive knew how to handle a firearm. Her stance was good and she gripped the pistol in both hands, anticipating the recoil even as she pulled down on the trigger. She caught the lady cop neatly between the eyes. The back of the woman’s head exploded in a shower of gore. I clapped my hands over my ears, uselessly striving to drown out the ringing.

Remy shook me urgently. “Tell me what you can see.”

I looked up in time to watch the thing atop the female officer struggle in the wake of the headshot. The body still stood, despite taking a bullet in the face. The inky black shadow writhed and twisted madly.

At first I thought it was in pain—then I realized that it was shoving bits of itself deeper inside of her, like it was grabbing fistfuls of her nerves and yanking them like strings. There seemed to be too much damage for any kind of fine-tuned control now that a whole section of her brain was missing. Her gun hand spasmed, sending a wild shot into the floor, and then the fingers started to go slack.

“Shadows,” I said quickly. “Stuck to the back of them. You can’t see them?”

“No, but I’m not Anakim.”

I frowned at that. “At some point you’re going to tell me what all these damned words mean.” Then, “You seriously can’t see that shit?”

Saliriel pounded the male officer into a pulp on the floor and I heard his rider scream in frustration. It was the sound of nightmares. The naked woman fired another round into the lady cop, and her rider also shrieked in fury, if not in pain. I twitched as the unreal sound clawed against the insides of my skull.

“There’s… smudges. Something behind them,” Remy replied, squinting. Whatever he was doing, it made his eyes flash with unearthly blue fire. Then he made a frustrated noise. “I can’t see them like you can. Tell me what’s happening,” he urged.

After the second bullet, the rider lost nearly all control over the lady cop. With a final, last-ditch effort, it did something that made no sense at first. Awkwardly, it made her drop the gun, sending the weapon sliding over the floor toward the throne-end of the room. I stared, unable to respond to my brother as I watched the shadow-thing shuck itself out of the lady cop.

She crumpled to the ground like a cast-off suit of clothes, and then it did the unthinkable. It slithered darkly across the floor, hugging its belly along the tiles. It had more limbs than I could have imagined and reminded me of a fat black centipede crossed with a hooded cobra. It followed the path of the cast-off gun, and too late I realized what it was really after.

A fresh host.

“It’s on the move,” I breathed and tried not to bring up any of the food I hadn’t eaten all day. The thing paused between the slave and the dead bouncer, its sort-of head questing with little feelers around the two corpses. Then it seemed to make a decision and dove for its target.

Remy reached over and grabbed my shoulder. He shook me once, firmly, locking his unearthly blue eyes on mine.

“Brother, if you never believe a word I say again, believe this now. If you can see them, you can hurt them. That’s what you do.”

“How?” I gasped.

Like a fashionable, ebon-haired Yoda, he replied, “Don’t think. Just do.” Then he shoved me toward the fallen bouncer even as the body started to twitch. Thereafter, he launched himself toward Saliriel, joining the fight at last. Belatedly I realized that he hadn’t been cowering with me in the corner out of fear. He had stayed there to watch over me.

Setting that thought aside to consider later, I charged the short distance across the room to the coiling, horrible thing that only I could see.

T
he shadow-ray-centipede-thing responded with a furious hiss. The fact that I was the only one in the room who could hear it—aside from the other creepy-crawly—made the sound that much more unnerving.

The creature flashed scarlet eyes and its Exacto-blade smile at me, then thrust its head deep into the dead bouncer. The black, squirming length of it pressed up against his back, going flat like a tapeworm. The body twitched disgustingly as it fought to take control of his nervous system, and the bit that served it for a face quested deep within the dead man’s skull. I stared, momentarily stunned to inaction as I saw its steely grin ghosting through his slack, gray features.

The bouncer’s eyes snapped open, and for an instant they were its eyes—red, malevolent, and impossible. Writhing against his back as it worked his nerves from within, it brought the dead bouncer ponderously to his feet. His right hand, still trembling unsteadily, began to reach for the nearby gun. I didn’t waste time waiting for him to grab it.

I rushed it, yelling.

Well, maybe not yelling, exactly.

It was more like… singing.

If a voice could be raised in song that was all fury and destruction, my throat opened up and this sound poured out. I felt it reverberate from the very bottom of my chest, filling my head till my teeth rattled. It electrified me in ways I could neither name nor pause to understand in that adrenaline-kissed instant. I bellowed something like, “
Zhaaaaaaaah!
” and the end of it cut off in a guttural huff that was as much a curse as a challenge.

Just as instinctive was the motion of my hands. I brought them up as if I held twin versions of that curved bronze blade. The weapons weren’t a dream this time—they coalesced from power and light as if shaped by the purity of my will. I could see the white-blue glow of them on the edges of my vision, and I knew with a certainty as inexplicable as it was absolute that the syllables pouring from my throat honed and focused these weapons. In the few heartbeats it took to close the space between the dead bouncer and me, the glow of light exploded to a brilliant cascade.

With a second shout tearing up from my chest, I slashed ferociously at the shadow-rider’s face. The light streamed forth. It passed harmlessly through the flesh of the dead man, but tore into the writhing form of the shadow. I cackled wildly as I realized that I wielded what amounted to truncated lightsabers.

The rider shrieked under my onslaught, the brilliant power tearing whole chunks from its blacker-than-black form. Baring its teeth and keening with both pain and rage, the thing launched its host at me, dead fists flailing. I took a blow to the jaw, but shook it off, then dodged the second strike with that faster-than-seemed-right movement. In the midst of the barrage I somehow had the presence of mind to kick the gun with a backwards sweep of one leg, sending it spinning far to the other side of the room.

After the initial strike, I found I had to pause, take a breath, and gather my focus before the weapons once again coalesced. I could feel a hollow tugging in the center of my chest, breathless and hot.

I pinned the dead bouncer against the big square pillar so I could concentrate on the thing working his body. We were twined so close, the dead man snapped his teeth at my throat. Instinctively, I struck out with…
something
… on that side of my body. I caught a glow of light in my peripheral vision, softer than what was gathering in my hands. Like the blades, it didn’t seem physical, exactly—just a wall of force that slammed up from behind my shoulder to strike the bouncer in the side of the face.

It didn’t phase the zombie much, but the shadow-rider reacted as if I’d broadsided it with a two-by-four. I felt the impact as if I’d shoulder-checked the thing, but with something that wasn’t precisely my shoulder. My brain refused to process it in that moment, stuttering past the unlikely bits to keep me in the fight.

Eye to eye with the rider, it shrilled its fury, spearing me with a look of utter hate.

“I don’t like you either, asshole,” I snarled, loosing another volley of power. I shouted the same two reverberant syllables right into its face.

“
Zhaaaa-kiaaaaalll!
”

I’m not sure when I realized it was my name.

The thing went slack, slipping within the dead man’s flesh. I was out of juice and gasping with effort. Before the abomination could escape, I reached out and seized it in one hand. Shock robbed the strength from my grip. The whole of the creature was cold in a way that sucked the heat from my skin.

A part of my brain back-pedaled in horror at too many things to count—the slick rubbery texture of its flesh, the fact that I had my hand wrapped around something that wasn’t physically there, the nerveless chill that prickled like teeth all the way up my arm. A searing weight spread across my back in defiance of the cold. Tied to something wild and electric just behind me, it tugged a little painfully at muscles running down either side of my spine.

When I flexed those muscles, it felt as if nothing could stand against me.

Battle lust surged through me, finding vent in another shout. I yanked the creature through the dead bouncer. Its long whip of a tail coiled spastically and its many filament-like appendages scrabbled at my face and hands. The end of each felt sharp as a cat’s claw. My skin welted wherever its legs struck.

Ignoring the pain, I hoisted it and stepped away from the dead man. He crumpled to the floor in an untidy tangle of limbs, his head striking the tiles with such a rotten-melon sound that I was grateful he was already a corpse. The rider hissed and gnashed in a bid to intimidate, but instinct and adrenaline bulwarked my will. I snarled a rapid patter of syllables. Intent, rather than meaning, blossomed somewhere deep in my mind. The only translation I had was
unmaking
. With that intent clamoring through me, I gripped the inky shadow and let my other hand fall like a hammer against what must have been its heart.