Battle Angel

  Sylvester nodded contemplatively and studied the map across the room. He turned to Susan and spoke in a hushed tone.

  “Let’s go where we have some privacy,” he said, leading her into one of the abandoned offices to the side. She gave him an inquisitive look as they entered the room.

  “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said, closing the door behind him. “I think it’s time.”

  Was it Detective Sylvester’s imagination, or did a slight flush bloom in Susan’s face? Her beautiful Archangel features shone even in the depressed darkness of the little office.

  “What is it, David?” Susan said softly.

  “I didn’t want to share this until now, until I was more certain. But I’ve studied the attack patterns from yesterday, along with the series of disappearances we’ve heard of since then.”

  “I knew there was something, but I couldn’t put my finger on it,” Susan said. “What have you found?”

  “This is more than just an assault of demons causing chaos and sowing death. This assault is organized. Methodical. They’re being led by one among their ranks.”

  A look of understanding crossed Susan’s face. “So maybe, if we can get to the one who is controlling them, we could stop them.”

  Sylvester nodded. “There has to be a way to get at the head demon. And we’re going to find it. No matter what,” Sylvester said. “But we’ll need some Angels to go after it.”

  “You’re right,” Susan said. “We need the Angels now more than ever. Only our kind could find this head demon and exterminate him.”

  Now it was Sylvester’s turn to flush. He was touched that Susan still considered him an Angel, that she didn’t see his disgrace and dewinging as an indelible stain forever.

  “The Angels. We have to get them back, David. It’s our duty,” Susan said. “For years I taught these Guardians. I put everything into training them. I believed in it. Just as you did. And then I slowly started to see what was happening. I first started to doubt them when . . .” She paused and looked at Sylvester. “When they did what they did to you so many years ago. When they took your wings.”

  Sylvester blushed and coughed into his hand. “Thank you. For your . . . kindness.”

  “I could never be anything but kind to you, David,” Susan said. She smiled lightly, placing her hand on the detective’s arm. It was strange, the feeling of that touch through his wrinkled dress shirt. It almost startled him. The touch of an Angel could do miraculous things.

  A knock on the door interrupted their private conversation.

  “Archangel Archson? Tech has a question for you,” a young woman with glasses said, oblivious to the moment she’d just walked in on.

  “I’ll be right there.” Susan was gone in a few moments, the elegant Archangel following the resistance volunteer into the buzzing hive of workers.

  Sylvester followed and returned to his desk—and the map beside it. He sighed, pulling his glasses off and looking at the dust that had accrued on the lenses. He started wiping them with his shirt, then sat down at his desk and poured himself a steaming cup of joe from his seemingly bottomless thermos of coffee.

  He put on his freshly cleaned glasses and looked out across the open work area that had just been set up this morning, at the wide-eyed kids just barely out of college, the veteran Angels, his ACPD partner, plus several dissidents and former Angel activists. All brought together by his and Susan’s efforts, with their undercover mole helping inside the sanctuary. They were a motley crew if ever there was one.

  What would they be able to stop from here? Anything?

  But they had no choice. They had to keep going. Any alternative was too bleak to consider.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Maddy woke with an unuttered scream on her lips, her hands desperately clawing in front of her as if defending herself. It took her a moment to remember that she’d made her way back to Kevin’s house to recover after her near-death save by the 101. She gasped for breath as she sat up, drawing her tangle of sheets around her shivering frame. Cold sweat clung to her goose-pimpled skin, collecting in a small stream along the small of her back.

  She’d had the dream again.

  For the past two days she’d been plagued by a recurring nightmare interrupting her sleep like clockwork throughout the night. She kept seeing the same, unblinking visage. Of death. On the blasphemous face of a Dark One on the 101 freeway, just like the one she’d saved the Vespa girl from. In the nightmare, the demon would emerge unscathed from a crater, its body shimmering black smoke and fire, and stare right at Maddy.

  Then, instead of flying off, the demon would slowly stride toward her. With terror coursing through her veins even in sleep, Dream Maddy would try to escape. Her now-trained wings would pump once, then twice—and nothing. Her feet were somehow stuck to the ground. She couldn’t take off. In desperation she would try to run. But her feet merely became even more glued to the earth, until her legs wouldn’t move. She was paralyzed. Then the sky would grow dark, far darker than it had been on the day of the first attack.

  The nightmare demon would take its time as it walked toward her, its terrible gnarled limbs swinging with confidence. Its horns towered over its hideous face, and spikes rippled along its back as it loped. Its black-red eyes would flicker, and it was as if the demon felt a distinct pleasure as it came closer.

  Dream Maddy’s skin would then grow hotter and hotter as the Dark Angel drew itself closer. So hot it felt as if Maddy’s skin were somehow melting from inside. And still the demon came.

  Was it smiling now?

  The bloodred orb of its eye would draw closer and closer until it seemed to encompass Maddy’s entire field of vision. The sensation was unendurable as she would struggle, to no avail, to escape.

  The Dark One would then lean down, closer and closer, and open its dread mouth. In her dream, Maddy knew then that she was going to die. The demon’s stinking, sulfurous breath blistered her skin as it hissed her name.

  “Maddy . . .”

  At the end of the nightmare, Maddy would always open her mouth to scream, but no sound would come out. It was too late.

  The dream was always the same, and always so much more vivid than any normal nightmare. This dream had the ultrareal quality she felt whenever she focused on someone’s frequency or had one of her unbidden premonitions. It was a fevered hallucination in her slumbering brain, but somehow more real than reality itself. It never failed to shake her to her very core.

  Pulling herself together, Maddy looked out the window and saw it was still pitch-dark outside, in the small hours of the night. The cold sweat had already begun to evaporate and her fast breathing had calmed down, but there was no chance she’d get back to sleep for a while. Stepping out of bed, Maddy shivered and pulled her oversize T-shirt down closer to her knees as she searched for her pajama pants. She slipped them on, went to the window, and slowly opened the curtains.

  There was the Angel City sign. It had been such an important marker for her during her childhood, giving her something to rail against while everyone else venerated the Angels. Then, when she met Jacks and later discovered her own half-Angel heritage, it took on two completely new meanings.

  Now the sign was cloaked in darkness. Power was scarce in the Immortal City right now, and on war footing it made no sense to light the sign. As she drew her arms around her chest to keep warm, Maddy thought of how people across the city could no longer look to the hill and its gleaming beacon to orient themselves, or to give them a signpost, something to hope, dream, and wish on. Instead it was a void, reminding the entire city of how bleak their situation was becoming.

  The sign was dark, and the Angels were silent.

  Maddy’s gaze crossed over the neighborhoods below the phantom sign, which had also been plunged into eerie darkness. The power had failed again in the night, and she walked now to her
bedside lamp and to test the switch. Nothing.

  The Immortal City was now entirely dark, its flashy lights and beaming billboards of perfect Angels having receded into the shadows. Residents in the city moved quickly back and forth between darkened homes, fearfully looking up at the sky for the next demon attack, and Humvee units, spread way too thin, patrolled the streets to prevent looting and to help those in need.

  The severity and quickness of the first wave of the demon attack two days earlier took most everyone by utter surprise. But now they knew what the demons were capable of, and they knew more were coming. Many more, an untold number. Each one capable of causing unimaginable havoc and bloodshed equal to a major natural disaster.

  The city staggered under the constant threat of demons. Evacuation routes had been totally destroyed, the supplies had all but stopped coming in, and the demons kept waging random terrorist attacks. But the worst part was the waiting: Why wouldn’t the demons just get it over with?

  Maddy walked in darkness to her desk and found the candle and matches she always kept ready. With a spark against the rough strip along the box, the match head flared and lit. She brought the flame to the wick of the candle, hot wax drips falling onto the desk as it caught. The flickering flame cast her face in a warm yellow-orange, the corners of the room still lingering in darkness.

  The city would wake to another morning under siege. At this point they were waiting, helpless, for the next demon assault. Any plans the city had ever made for emergencies proved to be worse than useless under the stress of a demon invasion, and instructions that looked good on paper turned to chaos and panic as soon as an actual emergency occurred. And now those who remained barricaded themselves behind boarded-up windows. They stayed inside, rationing food and water, waiting for the inevitable main strike from the demon army just lying off the coast.

  The demons knew what they were doing, in the most terrible way—they were trying to crush Angel City’s spirit before they even fully invaded.

  Maddy sighed and tried not to brood. The night was still long. No rays of dawn cut through the darkness outside.

  But it had been two days, and she still hadn’t heard from Tom. A brief message had arrived via navy messenger that he was alive after the first wave, and she knew the navy had been fighting isolated battles near the sinkhole itself these past few days, but communications were spotty. And she still couldn’t focus on his frequency.

  To top everything off, Maddy felt so useless just sitting here in Angel City. She’d never been trained for battle of any kind. But was she really just supposed to wait for the next full attack and hope she managed to grab onto a frequency of someone to save? Then she thought of Tom out there, willing to risk his life every day. . . .

  And then sometimes she would think of Jackson. Stupid, silly stuff, like the way he’d tickle her when they argued about something to get her to laugh. And then, just like that, a sea of sadness would wash over her, and she’d have to go do something else, anything else, before she got sucked down too deep. Having to worry about Tom was hard enough; to sit and ponder Jacks every day was too much for her heart to handle.

  Maddy lay back down on her bed, but it seemed hopeless that sleep would come. She turned over on her side and scanned her bookshelf for something to read.

  • • •

  She woke up curled on the couch. Early morning light streamed in through the window. It couldn’t have been later than 6:30. Mercifully, she’d fallen asleep reading in the living room after going downstairs. The flashlight she’d used to light her book had fallen to the floor, and the novel was open, facedown on her chest.

  The old cream-colored phone was ringing. Groggy from sleep, Maddy had to reach and stumble to even find it where it was stuck under a stack of magazines on the lowest shelf of the side table by the couch. Because of cell phones, which had stopped working after the first assault, she couldn’t even remember the last time she’d heard the landline ring.

  “Hello?”

  “Maddy?” said the voice on the other end. “You’re there? You’re really there?”

  “Tom,” she said in a rush of relief. “You’re all right.”

  “I’m okay. I’m okay,” Tom said. “I’ve been trying to get in touch with you for so long, Maddy.”

  Maddy let the relief bleed through her body. Tom was alive. He was right there.

  “I . . . I can’t tell you how much I’ve been thinking about you,” Maddy said, her voice starting to break up with emotion. “Wanting just to hear your voice.”

  There was a moment of silence on his end of the line.

  “I miss you, Maddy. I miss you so much. It means everything to me to hear you say that. Just to know that you’re out there, safe . . .”

  “Of course I am, Tom,” Maddy said, still tingling with relief. “I’m here for you.”

  “Maddy . . . I don’t know what’s going to happen. There were casualties.”

  Tears streamed down Maddy’s face as she held the phone to her ear. “Don’t say that, Tom. I know exactly what’s going to happen. You’re going to beat back the demons and be safe. . . .”

  “And come back to you,” Tom said.

  “Yes,” Maddy said. “And come back to me.”

  But even as she said it, Maddy knew that they were each just pretending to be strong for the other, that the Dark Angels were even more powerful than they could have ever imagined. They were a force of evil hell-bent on dominating humanity, and enslaving those it didn’t kill.

  Maddy heard an air raid siren blare in the background on Tom’s end.

  “Tom? What’s going on?” she asked, gripped by fear. As the siren continued to sound, their connection became worse and worse. . . .

  “It’s okay, I’m okay. It’s just a drill,” Tom shouted over the noise. The poor connection made his voice crackle. “But I do have to go now.”

  “Okay. I’m just so happy to know you’re all right,” Maddy said, tears still dripping down her face as she tried to be strong. “And you’ll stay that way, too. You’re going to be back here safe. Really soon.”

  Tom spoke, but she could barely hear him.

  “Maddy, I lo—”

  The line went dead.

  “Tom? Tom?” Maddy’s voice sounded small and lonely, echoing into emptiness.

  He was gone.

  Maddy carefully placed the ancient phone back into its cradle. She felt detached from her body and found herself once again questioning her true feelings for Tom. How was it possible she didn’t know by now? And how could she ever sort them out?

  And how could she ever believe that she could forget about Jackson so quickly?

  Angel City under siege, Jackson, Tom, the whirlwind surrounding her illegal save and her consequential loss of celebrity . . . it was all just too much.

  Maddy’s cheeks were still wet with tears when the landline rang again.

  “Tom?” Maddy said, hopeful.

  “Madison Montgomery Godright?” a stern voice asked on the other end.

  Definitely not Tom. “Yes?” she said tentatively.

  “Please hold for President Linden.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  The morning sun cut hard against the besieged metropolis. The early blazing rays illuminated a cityscape raging with fires and thick, black smoke filling the sky and reminding the citizens of the previous days’ terror.

  Maddy looked out at the city through the tinted bombproof windows of the armored black sedan. The sun and its glare had been muted to a cold gray, and the air-conditioning was so intense that Maddy felt like she’d catch a cold as they drove. For a few blissful seconds, the demon war felt like a distant dream as she watched the palm trees pass outside. She was being escorted to a meeting with Ted Linden, president-elect of the United States and president of the Global Angel Commission, which, as of a few days earlier, was in charge of co
ordinating the international defense against the demons.

  Four Marine Humvees armed to the teeth with turreted guns and grenade launchers flanked the sedan as it drove down the abandoned Angel Boulevard. They weren’t taking any chances.

  Maddy idly looked up at the billboards still glittering with images of the beautiful Guardians, which now seemed like ancient relics from another age. She couldn’t help feeling a small pang as she saw Emily Brightchurch’s face splayed across one of the most prominent ads on the boulevard. There was Emily, nearly naked in just her underwear, pouting at the camera, covering her chest for decency with one free arm.

  In gigantic, dripping, terrifying red letters, a vandal had spray-painted NO HOPE.

  Maddy turned away.

  The man on security detail sitting in the passenger seat reached into his inner suit pocket and pulled out a piece of black cloth. A blindfold.

  He leaned forward and gestured with it. “For safety.”

  Maddy nodded, took the blindfold, and lightly tied it around her head. Through a tiny gap she could still see a sliver of sunlight, which brought her some comfort. But then the man reached back and pulled the fabric even tighter until everything was blackness.

  “Apologies, Ms. Montgomery.”

  Soon she could feel the sedan pull in somewhere and park, and Maddy was led into what felt like a flat, open space. Gusts of wind whipped and rippled against her body.

  “We’re taking a chopper,” the security guard said as he took her by the arm and guided her onto what she imagined was a Black Hawk helicopter.

  Maddy could hear what sounded like two fighter jets tearing across the sky, so deafening that she knew they must be nearby.

  “Is everything okay?” she asked, cocking her head to show concern.

  “Don’t worry, miss. Those birds are just here to provide air cover,” a young soldier’s voice said. “We’re just fine.”