Seals (23 page)

“You see,” he said pleased, too pleased.
“Stop fighting it and let go. Embrace the darkness and all its
purity. Let go of the foul angel and become the creature feared by
all. Become Death.”

Kara was so angry and tired that she could
hardly think or stand. Her head hurt so much that she thought her
brain had melted. Her eyes narrowed to slits.

“I think there’s been enough death, don’t
you agree?” said Kara. “I won’t be part of your schemes.”

She gritted her teeth at the burning pain
that shot down her body. Her vision blurred, and the archfiend
became two instead of one. She shook her head, but it made the
pounding worse. She could see Betaazu smiling at her pain. How she
hated him. How she hated them all.

She knew she should jump now, but something
was still holding her back.

“I’m going to get better,” she croaked.

Her throat was raw and was closing up. She
tried to convince herself that she was all right by speaking again.
“You’re lying. You’re a liar. You’re just trying to trick me.”

“Am I?” laughed the dark god. “You can feel
it, can’t you? In the pit of your pitiful little angel soul, you
feel it pushing its way in. It wants to show itself. You want it to
come. You know I speak the truth,
Death
.”

Kara trembled, “Don’t call me that.”

“Why not? It is your
true
name.”

Could it really be true?

“It is true,” said the archfiend, as though
he was reading her mind again.

“Why do you think we injected you with the
extract of darkness? Because we knew. We knew if we combined the
extract with your special essence, your unique bloodline, we could
create the final knight. You are the warrior of the dark gods, the
killer of angels. You are the final seal.”

“Your bloodline has been traced back to the
beginning of all things, to the very first archfiends, before we
were cast into prison by the archangels.”

Beelzebub sat back down on his throne. “And
when rumors of a special angel with the powers of both an angel and
an elemental reached us in our remote
doomed
prison, we
knew. We waited eons for you, for this chance. You—and you
alone—were the missing link. Without you, we could never have
broken free from our
perpetual
doom.”

Kara’s eyes widened. “No, it can’t be.”

“Believe it,” said Betaazu. “This,” he
raised his arms, “is all your doing. You helped release our
masters. You did this. You saved us all.”

“No.” Kara shook her head.

Black blood dripped from her nose and from
the hole in her back. Her headache pulsed unmercifully.

“Yes,” said the archfiend, confident of his
ancient intelligence. “The darkness thrives inside you, and you
will destroy the archangels, the angels, and all living things.
Rejoice in darkness. It is eternal. You are perfect.”

The world shifted around Kara. Images that
the white oracle had spoken played inside her mind. She could see
the shadowy figure with great wings that soared through the
blackened and smoky sky. The white oracle had shown her images of
death, the fourth knight of the apocalypse. And she was
it
.

“But I thought…” She shook her head.
What
did she think? What else could the wings have meant other than that
she was becoming a monster freak, a killer of angels?
But to
think that she was going to change into
the
ultimate monster
was too much to bear.

But what about her light…the light that
still lingered somewhere in her soul?

“I won’t change,” said Kara. Her voice
wavered, but she didn’t care. “It’s not going to happen.”

“You
will
change. It’s inevitable.”
The archfiend spoke confidently.

“Your defiance is a strength that will make
you an even better knight, a better bringer of death.”

“I won’t,” Kara repeated. Her voice was
stronger.

“You said it yourself. I didn’t change yet,
so it’s not working. Whatever you did to me, didn’t work. You
failed.”

A cold smile spread on the archfiend’s face.
“No, I didn’t.”

She wouldn’t accept this defeat. She’d known
and tasted fear and pain before, but it was nothing compared to
what went through her now.

“NO!” she screamed, enraged because she knew
it was true.

Kara stumbled toward his throne, limbs
wobbling. She fumbled in a fog with her broken body.

Kill him. Kill the monster creator.
It was all she could think of. Her steps became more feeble, and
her vision blurred.

She would kill him, if it were the last
thing she did.

The archfiend smirked. “And now, my dear,
it’s time to give you a little push—”

As Kara neared the dais, the dark god raised
his hand and shot a black tendril of power straight into Kara’s
chest.

It was like being shot by a twelve-gauge
shotgun. She was blasted to the ground in a flash of blinding pain.
The darkness overwhelmed her like a hot fever, and an
uncontrollable and ancient evil welled up inside her. Dark fire was
dragging her down into an abyss. She was losing her hold of the
light. She was losing herself. She was losing Kara.

Her golden ring shimmered,
but then the color faded, and it became black.
The little
light inside her flickered one last time and went out.

A moment passed and then
the creature she had become jumped to its feet.

It felt no more pain. It
felt nothing. But its senses were heightened, and it could see
everything. It knew everything. It smelled the terror. It smelled
the blood of mortals and angels. It tasted the pain of millions. It
licked its gray lips. It wanted to kill. It was created to kill. It
wanted to extinguish the light. It wanted only darkness. It
understood darkness. It
was
darkness.

A faint, red-gray mist
covered its body, and
red veins began to grow in its glossy
gray skin. Long black hair billowed from its head,
and where a wound had been moments ago, a perfect large black
leathery wing sprouted and grew.

The creature turned and
awaited its master’s instructions. It wanted to please its
master.

“Kill the archangels,” its master ordered.
“Them first. Then kill all the angels. Leave not a single one.”

The creature sneered in delight. It wouldn’t
fail. It longed to taste the death of the angels. It licked its
gray lips in anticipation and spread its massive veiny wings.

With a dripping maw, Death smiled, jumped
from the ledge, and dove down into the battle.

Chapter 20

D
avid swung and
sliced off the head of a clown demon with his soul blade. It hissed
at him before it thumped to the ground with a surprised expression
frozen on its face. Black blood sputtered over David’s boots as he
kicked the body.

“Stupid clown demons,” he clenched his
jaw.

He would slice all the clown demons to
ribbons. He hated clown demons. He remembered that Lilith had
changed him into a clown demon, and that he had wanted to hurt
Kara. It still haunted him that he could have hurt the only girl in
all the worlds that he’d have given his life to protect.

Kara…

The thought of her created an ache in his
chest.
Was she all right?

He remembered how unbelievably
attracted
he’d been to her the first time he’d seen her in
Horizon. He had felt on fire even before he knew her name. Her
brown eyes had sparkled when she had looked at him, and he had been
bewitched. He had never been the same.

Of course she had thought him arrogant,
rude, ill mannered, and charming—all of those things, but that had
just been his way to break the ice. She made him nervous, and it
made him want to be his best around her. No other girl had ever had
that effect on him before. She was electrifying.

Movement caught his eye. David spun and
thrust his soul blade hilt-deep into the eye socket of a lime-green
creature. The demon went limp and sank to the ground.

He wiped the black-green blood from his
blade on the sleeve of his jacket and looked up.

Throngs of angels and demons surrounded him
on the east side of the vast desert plain. He was in the middle of
the hot zone. He fought alongside a battalion of a thousand angels.
And even though the angels were outnumbered by demons that kept on
coming at them as if they were sprouting from the ground, the
angels were skilled fighters, and the demons were falling fast.
Their bodies crumbled into ashes that blew away in the wind or
disappeared into the earth.

They could win this. They would win this
war.

Unlike the other angels, it came as no
surprise to David when they found a demon and monster cavalry
waiting when his legion had arrived at the foot of the volcano. Mr.
Patterson had predicted it. He had told them to expect the
archfiends. And they were here.

The war had started in the blink of an
eye.

The wails of the dead and dying mixed with
the clatter of metal on metal and the thumping of fists on flesh.
It felt as though the earth were cracking like an egg. The
crescendo of sounds was so continuous that they all merged into a
single annihilating roar. The ground trembled and thundered like
the beating of a giant heart.

David had never been in a war of this
magnitude. All he could do was take cover and get his bearings. He
fought like a good soldier. He fought for what was right. He fought
for the freedom of Earth and of Horizon.

He fought for Kara.

He struck both his soul blades into the
abdomen of a zombie demon, pulled them out, and made his way
forward into the melee. Dust and sand obscured the flailing arms
and weapons so that it was hard to tell angel from demon.

But his more pressing problem was Kara.

He was faltering because he was distracted.
He couldn’t stop thinking about Kara and where she was. He knew she
had flown off to search for the last knights. But now that Jenny’s
ring had gone, it was all up to Kara.

Kara, where were you?

He should be with her.

He saw a flash of purple and spotted Jenny
right away. Her purple hair and jacket were like a beacon, and he
knew it wasn’t such a good idea to stick out so much. He fought his
way near her.

She wore her silver bow wrapped around her
back, and like him she brandished a soul blade in each hand. She
slithered like a snake behind an unsuspecting demon, and with a
flick of her wrists she perforated the demon’s neck, and it slumped
to the ground.

David had forgotten how skilled Jenny was
with a blade. He’d always thought of her as an archer, but she
didn’t have enough time to nock her arrows here. There were too
many demons, and she didn’t have enough arrows. She would have
needed thousands of them.

David scanned the battle. He recognized a
few faces, but Peter and Ashley were nowhere in sight. He prayed
they were all right.

Jenny caught sight of David, but she didn’t
smile at him as he rushed over to her. Even before he reached her,
he knew something was wrong. Her face was taunt and troubled. She
kept opening and closing her hands.

“I’m glad to see you in one piece,” she
said.

Her face and clothes were stained in black
blood. “Any news from Kara?”

David shrugged and didn’t meet Jenny’s eyes.
“Not yet.”

“David, I’ve got some bad news,” she said
quickly, looking over her shoulder.

He read the panic in her voice, and his own
cold panic started to well inside him. He already knew what she was
going to say.

“My—my ring’s gone.”

She looked terrified. “It just…it just
disappeared, just like that. I didn’t even realize. It could have
happened hours ago. I had forgotten about it.”

And then she spoke quickly. “What does it
mean? Do you think anything happened to Kara? Do you think she’s
still okay?”

David couldn’t answer her because he didn’t
know. He didn’t want to face the obvious explanation—that Kara had
failed.

Jenny quickly changed the subject.

“Never seen so many demons in all my angel
days. I don’t know what I expected. Who knew there would be so many
demons in the Netherworld?”

“I knew there’d be lots of them, but it
appears that they all came out to play today.”

A demon loomed over behind Jenny, but before
she noticed it, David knocked it on its head with the pommel of his
dagger and sliced its neck as it collapsed to the ground.

Jenny looked mildly surprised. “Thanks.”

“Don’t mention it. Won’t be the last time,
that’s for sure.”

David knew she was looking for someone
special.

“Did you see Peter anywhere?” said Jenny, as
though she were reading his mind.

David shook his head sadly.

“No. But I’m sure he’s okay. He’s a real
fighter, our Pete. And I’m sure he’s got all kinds of new tricks
and gadgets up his sleeve. I wouldn’t worry about him.”

But Jenny didn’t look relieved. She looked
worried.

“He’ll be fine, Jen,” said David. “I
promise.”

“Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

David thought that she was about to cry, but
whatever frustration she felt inside she vented on a demon who had
no idea what had hit him until her blade had perforated its
head.

“I don’t know, David. There’re so many of
them.” Jenny straightened up.

“With the rings gone…with Kara gone…”

She faltered, her voice cracked.

“Don’t say it, Jenny,” said David.

“Maybe our rings are gone, but that doesn’t
mean Kara’s is. There’s still one knight left, and she still has a
chance at killing it. I know she can do this. I have to believe she
can, and she
will
. It’s up to us to give her all the time we
can. It’s our job to make sure we kill as many demons as we
can.”