The Fallen 3 (11 page)

“Bloody hell,” Jeremy whispered.

Down in the hole were bodies—dried yellow bones, some still covered with leathery flecks of meat—but wedged into the corner, now looking up at them with hateful eyes, was a sight Aaron had never expected to see again.

He had thought them all destroyed, and if not destroyed, sent back to Heaven by his own hand to face the judgment of the Lord, but there was no mistaking the smell of its hate for him … for his kind.

An angel of the heavenly host Powers.

“Abomination,” he hissed, a mere shell of its former divinity.

And seeing what had been done to the angel that had hunted the Nephilim nearly to extinction … Aaron actually felt a tinge of pity.

“That’s one of the bastards that was hunting us, isn’t it?” Jeremy asked, glaring down into the pit.

Aaron didn’t answer, still stunned by the horrific sight.

“I say we leave ’im down there to rot.” Jeremy leaned forward to spit into the hole.

Aaron’s hand shot out, catching the fluid before it could fall upon the imprisoned angel.

“No” was all he said, the young man’s spit sizzling in his hand as it heated, turning to steam. “We’re not like them.”

Jeremy glared and walked away in a huff.

Aaron then turned to William. “Help me get him out of there.”

It wasn’t easy, but they managed to haul the injured angel from the death pit. Lying on the ground before them, he was a disturbing sight. It appeared that the trolls had been gradually feeding upon the Powers angel, and the thought nearly made Aaron sick to his stomach.

The angel drifted in and out of consciousness, rambling when awake, cursing the Nephilim’s very existence. He called them a blight in the eyes of God.

At least that was what this particular host of angels had believed.

Aaron thought of their leader and felt a chill of fear pass through him. Verchiel had been a formidable foe, and had almost succeeded in unleashing Hell on earth. He had planned to wipe out all life, and allow God the opportunity to start all over. Whether God wanted it or not.

But with the fate of the world hanging by a thread, Aaron had stopped Verchiel, forgiving him his sins and allowing him to return to Heaven to face the judgment of the Creator.

Aaron doubted that the Powers’ leader had gotten off easy for what he had intended for the world, and for the many Nephilim that had been murdered over the centuries.

“What are we going to do with him?” Vilma asked, interrupting Aaron’s thoughts. Even after what he had said to Jeremy, there was a part of him that wanted to leave the angel to rot in the cavern for all the evil it had done, but Aaron knew that wasn’t the answer.

One of the angel’s wings had been severed at the shoulder, while the other, which was missing most of its feathers, beat fitfully upon the ground, stirring up clouds of dust.

“He’s dying,” Aaron said as he knelt beside the trembling creature.

“Looks like he’s been doing that for a very long time,” Jeremy added from where the others stood. “Maybe we should help him along.”

Jeremy’s ax sparked and hissed as if eager for the taste of more violence.

Aaron could see the way the Nephilim looked at the Powers angel. Many of them had endured horrors that the hands of these angels had delivered to them, while others had certainly heard the stories. This was a creature whose sole purpose had been to exterminate them. How were they supposed to feel toward it?

“Maybe you’re right,” Aaron said, staring at the mangled angel on the ground before him.

“You’re not going to hurt him … are you?” Vilma asked.

It hurt him to have her ask such a thing of him, to think that he might be capable of such an act, but the times they lived in
had changed him—it had changed all of them—and he was sure she had seen him do things in battle that had given her pause.

“No,” Aaron said with a slight shake of his head. “The exact opposite, really.” He held up his hand and felt the power surge to life there. The power to forgive.

The power of redemption that was his gift as the Chosen One.

If the angel before him was filled with repentance, Aaron had the ability to send him back to Heaven.

The Powers angel continued to writhe upon the ground as Aaron placed a softly glowing hand upon his sunken chest. The angel was wearing little more than filthy rags, and Aaron felt the cool touch of his skin through his palm.

The angel stopped his thrashing and looked up into Aaron’s face. One of his eyes was missing, but the other fixed upon Aaron intensely.

“What are you?”

“I can send you home,” Aaron told him. “Back to—”

“Heaven,” the angel finished.

“Yes.”

“And what must I do to receive such mercy from the likes of you?” the Powers angel asked.

Aaron sighed, sensing the resentment, the disgust that the angel still held for his kind.

“You have to be sorry,” Aaron said.

“Sorry?” the angel asked.

“Sorry for the sins you’ve committed … sorry for all the pain you have caused.”

The Powers angel started to laugh, and it was an awful sound. Blood, like black tar, spurted from the sides of his grinning mouth, running down his face. Aaron recoiled.

“When I was taken by these … things,” the dying angel croaked, blood still filling his throat, “I was searching for the means to see you … to see all of you dead.”

An icy chill ran down Aaron’s spine as he felt the hate that emanated from the angel in waves.

“We lost the battle,” the angel said, nodding his head. “But we have not … have not lost the war.”

Aaron had heard enough. “Verchiel was defeated, sent back to Heaven to face the wrath of the Almighty. The Powers were wrong, and the sooner you accept—”

“Accept?” the angel barked, blood-flecked spittle spraying from his mouth. “There will be no acceptance. As I lay there in the pit, as those beasts feasted upon my flesh, I waited … not for my brothers to come, but for the eventual end.”

The angel’s ignorance was maddening, and it took everything that Aaron had to hold it together. And he needed to hold it together. The others were watching.

“I can’t help you. I can’t send you home, unless—”

“I have done no wrong,” the angel declared, straining with each word. “It was our mission to see the monsters that inhabited His world destroyed.”

“And yet, here we are,” Aaron said as he stood. He gestured to the other Nephilim. “No matter how misguided you were, your mission has failed.”

The angel’s one eye darted around as if searching for something.

“They’re still out there,” the angel whispered to the stone ceiling.

“Who?” Aaron asked. “The Powers? They’re gone,” Aaron told him again. “The Powers have all been sent back to Heaven to face judgment for their sins.” His palm began to radiate a warm glow again, and he held his hand out toward the angel.

“I sent them there.”

“Not all,” the angel said, violently shaking his head. “Others … others still search for the solution … the solution to the problem at hand.”

Aaron felt his insides twist into a knot. “I don’t understand,” he said.

“You will,” the angel replied, his single eye twinkling maliciously. “But by then it will be too late.”

Aaron knelt again beside the angel.

“What are you trying to tell me?” he asked, sensing that the angel was hinting at something very important.

The angel laughed again, sending new rivers of black blood from the corners of his mouth.

“Tell me,” Aaron demanded, the power of forgiveness gone from his hands, the warm glow replaced by a far more
destructive flame. He brought it close to the angel’s face.

“Wormwood,” the angel said through a ferocious snarl, batting Aaron’s hand away with surprising strength. “Wormwood will take you all.”

Then there came a flash of fire from the angel’s filthy, mangled hand, as a dagger of heavenly design formed there, a dagger that he plunged into his own throat.

Aaron and the others gasped.

The angel’s flesh began to burn, ignited by the blade forged from the fires of Heaven. And soon there was nothing more than smoldering ash, the angel’s final words echoing through the underground cavern.

Wormwood
.

G
abriel was on his elbows, butt in the air, tail wagging furiously from side to side, as he barked at Milton, who scampered around in front him.

“Sometimes it feels like that,” Lorelei said, her voice still sounding weak from the wear of Archon magick upon her form. She’d switched from coffee to tea, and was playing with her mug as they sat at one of the long tables in the old science lab, watching the animals.

“Hmm?” Lucifer questioned, looking to the dog and mouse at play.

“The tiny against the large … what we’re up against … it seems so big,” Lorelei explained.

“It does, doesn’t it,” Lucifer replied, now understanding. He brought a fresh cup of Earl Grey to his mouth.

Gabriel had dropped to his side upon the floor, his paws
waving about in play as Milton deftly evaded the dog’s attempts to swat at him. The small creature darted through Gabriel’s flailing limbs to poke at the dog’s black snout with its own, before quickly running away, and then starting the game all over again.

“Our numbers are so small,” Lorelei said. “And the threats get bigger and more dangerous.”

Lucifer nodded. “More and more every day,” the Morningstar said. “Far more than when we first began.”

“It’s going to come down to us having to pick and choose,” the white-haired girl said.

“There was supposed to be more of us,” he said sadly. “I’m sure the Almighty never expected the Powers to be quite so efficient with their hunting skills.”

“Every week I cast a spell to be certain,” she said, picking up her mug with trembling hands and taking a careful sip. “To make sure that there aren’t any more of us … Nephilim … out there alone, needing to understand what is happening to them.”

Lucifer didn’t expect any more Nephilim would be found, but he guessed there was always a chance, however slim that might be.

He looked at Lorelei and smiled. “There’s no harm in trying,” he said, even though he knew that anytime Archon magick was called upon, it took its toll on her.

She smiled sadly. “I keep hoping,” she said. “Even though deep down I know that we’re the only ones left.”

They sat in silence then, only Gabriel’s heavy breathing filling the air. The Labrador had fallen sound asleep on the floor, the tiny mouse nestled in the fur of his throat, both exhausted by their playful antics.

If only the world could be as peaceful.

“What if we’re not strong enough?” Lorelei finally asked.

Lucifer looked at her, not sure how to respond. It was a good question, and one that made him fear for the future.

For even though the Powers were gone, other supernatural threats intensified almost daily, and Lucifer could not help but remember the words spoken to him so very long ago, by a dark-haired child, in the ruins of a temple erected for the worship of some ancient god, long forgotten.

A
N
U
NNAMED
I
SLAND IN THE
A
EGEAN
S
EA
, B
EFORE THE
S
INKING OF
A
TLANTIS

The Morningstar reveled in the silence and the cold dampness of the ancient temple. How long it had been abandoned, what god had been prayed to and sacrificed to here, were mysteries that did not concern him. He had had his fill of gods.

The fallen angel preferred these once-holy places, built to the glory of some heathen deity, the resonance of past worship acting as a kind of buffer, preventing the Powers angels that hunted him from picking up his scent.

He, as with all his fallen brethren, was drawn to the abandoned,
the forgotten, finding in those haunted places the refuge that often escaped them.

Lucifer walked the hall of the sanctuary, pondering when last it had seen worshippers. At what appeared to be an altar, the Son of the Morning stopped to study a statue of the temple’s lord and master. It was a loathsome sight, its body misshapen and its head adorned with multiple tentacles.

Who … or what … could worship such a thing?
Lucifer wondered as he looked upon it.

“His worshippers called him name N’Ken-Thaa,” came a voice from somewhere behind him.

The Morningstar whirled, wings of oily black spread wide in a defensive posture.

“Show yourself,” the angel demanded, golden-flecked eyes studying the darkness but finding nothing.

Then a patch of shadow seemed to move as a small shape broke off and advanced toward him. It was a small human child, but something told the Morningstar that looks were deceiving.

“But I doubt that was his name,” the child said cheerily. “Or whether or not it could be pronounced by human lips even if they knew it.”

The child was barefoot and dressed in simple robes as he approached the altar.

“He was a silly sort,” the child continued, staring at the monstrous statue. “Filled with delusions of grandeur.”

Lucifer studied the child, or whatever it was. He sensed something unnatural here, and a large sword of fire grew from his hand.

“He was so sad when they stopped worshipping him, stopped believing in him,” the child said, shaking his head in sympathy. “He actually thought this world would one day belong to him.” He turned his inky-black eyes toward the angel. “Isn’t that silly?”

“What are you?” Lucifer demanded angrily.

“Who, me?” the child asked innocently. “I’m nobody now, but someday …”

For a brief instant Lucifer saw the child for what he was, and it filled the Son of the Morning with revulsion—and fear.

The angel lashed out with his sword of fire. There was an explosion of searing flame as the sword hit the floor where the child had been standing, its force cracking the marble.

“I’m over here,” the child’s voice rang out playfully, and Lucifer spun to see the little boy strolling from the darkness between two pillars, completely unscathed.

“You should do something about that temper,” the little boy said. “It might get you into trouble someday.” He stopped, smiled, and placed a hand over his mouth. “Too late.”