“Now they would like to see me as dead as they believe you to be.”
The old angel studied Camael’s face, obviously searching for signs of untruth. “I had heard that you left them, but was still saddened that it took as long as it did.”
“It was when I read the words of the prophecy that I realized it wasn’t the way,” Camael answered. “There had already been too much death. I began to believe that a new future for our kind rests in the hands of a half-breed—a Nephilim, chosen by God.”
Camael looked at Aaron, who shifted his feet nervously at the attention now placed upon him.
“That would be me, I guess,” he said.
The constables, who had been silent until that point, chuckled at the idea of this Nephilim boy being the Chosen One, but Camael waited to see how Belphegor would respond.
“You believe this one to be the Chosen?” he asked, pointing at Aaron with a long gnarled finger.
Camael noticed the dirt beneath his nails. “Yes, I believe it is so,” he answered.
“Have you ever heard anything so foolish, Belphegor?” Lehash asked, scratching the side of his grizzled face with the golden barrel of his gun. “Next they’ll be telling us that they ain’t had nothin’ to do with the rash a’ killin’s this last week.”
Silently Belphegor moved closer to Aaron. “Are you?” he asked as he began to sniff him from head to toe.
“I have no idea what they’re talking about,” Aaron explained. “We tried to tell them that before, but—”
“There’s quite a bit of violence locked up inside you,” Belphegor said, stepping back and wiping his nose with a finger. “Powerful stuff, wild—wouldn’t take much, I imagine, to set you on a killing spree.”
Camael stepped forward to defend the boy. “Aaron has accomplished much since the angelic nature has awakened. I’ve seen him use his power, on more than one occasion, to send a fallen angel home.”
Belphegor tilted his head to one side. “Home?” he questioned, deep crow’s feet forming at the corners of his squinting eyes. “What do you mean?”
Camael nodded slowly, allowing the meaning of his words to sink in. “Home,” he said, still nodding. “He sent them home to Heaven.”
Lehash began to laugh uproariously, looking to his fellow constables to join him. They smiled uneasily. Camael scowled, he did not care to have his motivations questioned and would have given everything to be free of the magickally augmented manacles.
The constable strode forward, puffing out his chest. “Go ahead, boy,” he said, holding his arms out. “I’m ready. Send me home to God.”
“It … it doesn’t work that way,” Aaron stammered. “I just can’t do it—something inside tells me when it’s time.”
Lehash laughed again, as if he’d never heard anything as funny, and Camael seethed.
“Silence, Lehash,” Belphegor ordered again, scrutinizing Aaron. “Is that true, boy?” he asked. “Have you sent fallen angels back to Heaven?”
Gabriel, who had been unusually quiet, suddenly padded toward Belphegor. “I saw him do it,” the dog said in all earnest. “And he made me better after I was hurt. Do you have anything to eat? I’m very hungry.”
Belphegor studied the animal, whose tail wagged eagerly. “This animal has been altered,” he said, looking first to Camael, and then to Aaron. “Who would do such a thing?”
“He was hurt very badly,” Aaron explained. “I … I didn’t even know what I was doing. I talked to the thing living inside me…. I begged it to save Gabriel and—”
Belphegor raised a hand to silence Aaron. “I’ve heard enough,” he said. “The idea of such power in the hands of someone like you chills me to the bone.”
“What should we do with them?” Lehash asked. There was a cruel look in his eyes, and Camael was convinced that he would do whatever Belphegor told him, no matter how dire.
“Take them back to the house,” the old angel said, turning toward the fenced yard he had come from. “I need time to think.”
“Listen to me, Belphegor,” Camael again tried to explain. “No matter how wrong it may seem to you, Aaron is the one you’ve been waiting for. Even the Archangel Gabriel believed it to be so. You have to trust me on this.”
The fallen angel returned his attention to Camael. “God’s most holy messenger is not here to vouch for him, and I’m afraid trust is in very short supply here these days,” Belphegor said sadly. “There’s far too much at stake. I’m sorry.” He looked to his people. “Take them back to the house, and be sure to keep the restraints on them.”
Lehash grabbed hold of Aaron, but the boy fought against him.
“Listen,” he cried out, and Belphegor stopped to stare at the Nephilim. “I’m trying to find my little brother—he’s the only real family I have left.”
Belphegor looked away, seemingly uninterested in the boy’s plight.
“Please!” he yelled. “Verchiel has him and I have to get him back. Let us go, and we’ll leave you alone, we promise.”
The old fallen angel ignored the boy, continuing on his way. Lehash again gripped him by the arm and pulled. “C’mon, boy. He don’t want to hear any more of your nonsense.”
“Goddam it!” Aaron shouted. “If you’re not going to listen, I’ll make you listen!”
And then he did something he should not have been able to do with the magickal restraints in place.
Aaron Corbet began to change.
CHAPTER FIVE
Aaron knew that time was of the essence and felt his patience stretched to its limits. The fallen angels, these citizens of Aerie, weren’t listening to him. He didn’t have time to be locked away in the playroom of some abandoned house. The Powers had Stevie, and the thought of his little brother still in the clutches of the murderous Verchiel acted like a key to unleash the power within him. Before he realized what he was doing, anger and guilt had unlocked the cage door, inviting the wild thing out to play. Aaron felt his transformation begin, and this time it hurt more than anything he could remember.
He turned to glare at Lehash, who still held his arm. “Let go of me,” he snarled, and felt a certain amount of satisfaction when the fallen angel did as he was told.
The pain was incredible, and Aaron could only guess it was because of the magickal restraints he still wore on his wrists and around his neck. He could feel the sigils burning upward from beneath his skin to decorate his flesh. They felt like small rodents with sharp, nasty claws, frantically digging to the surface. He screamed as sparks jumped from the golden manacles. The power within him wasn’t about to back down, even if it killed him.
He found Belphegor’s wide-eyed stare and held it with eyes as black as night. “Look at me!” Aaron cried. “Can’t you see that we’re telling the truth?”
He lurched toward the ancient fallen angel, crackling arcs of supernatural energy streaming from the enchanted restraints. From behind him he heard Camael and Gabriel call out for him to stop—but he couldn’t. He had to make Belphegor realize that they meant the people of Aerie no harm.
The constables were beside him. Lehash was aiming his guns, pulling back the golden hammers, while Lorelei had raised her hands and was mumbling something that sounded incredibly old. The one called Scholar stood at Belphegor’s side, ready to defend the wizened fallen angel if necessary.
“Give me the word, boss,” Lehash sneered, “and I’ll drop him where he stands.”
“No!” Belphegor ordered, raising his hand.
The sigils had finally burned their way to the surface of Aaron’s flesh, but there was no relief from the pain. His wings of ebony black had begun to expand on his back, but were hindered by the magick within the sparking bonds. The pain was just too much, and he fell to his knees upon the desiccated lawn in front of the abandoned home. “You’ve got to listen,” he moaned.
“Could just any Nephilim override the magicks of the manacles, Belphegor?” he heard Camael ask above the roar of anguish deafening his ears.
“He is powerful, I’ll grant him that,” Belphegor replied. “But I’ve met powerful halflings in my time, and that doesn’t make them prophets. Matter of fact, most are dead now, driven insane by power they couldn’t begin to understand, never mind tame.”
“And the markings?” Camael asked. “What do you make of them?”
Aaron opened his eyes to see the leader of Aerie kneeling beside him with Scholar. “I want to know what they mean,” Belphegor said, gesturing to the archaic symbols decorating the Nephilim’s face and arms. Scholar removed a pad of paper and pen from his back pocket and began to copy them.
“Do you believe me now?” Aaron asked weakly, exhausted from the battle between the angelic force and the magick within the golden restraints.
Belphegor stared at him with eyes ancient and inhuman, and he felt like some kind of new germ beneath a scientist’s microscope. “The question is, boy, do you believe that you are the Chosen?” Belphegor asked.
Aaron wanted to tell him what he wanted to hear, what would allow them their freedom, but he couldn’t. Although Camael and even the Archangel Gabriel believed he was the savior, the truth was, Aaron still saw himself as just a kid from Lynn, Massachusetts. Certainly he couldn’t deny his power, but did that make him the Chosen One?
I just don’t know.
“I … I’m not sure,” he told Belphegor, and felt the power begin to recede.
The old angel smiled and rose to his feet.
“Should we take them back to the house?” Lorelei asked. She had moved up behind the older angel, and Aaron noticed that her fingertips still crackled with the residual of her unused spell.
“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Belphegor replied. “Let them have the run of the place, but the manacles stay on until I’m sure they can be trusted.”
“Are you out of your mind, old man?” Lehash asked. The others looked uncomfortable with his outburst. “With so much going on out there, you’re gonna give them free reign? They’ll be murderin’ us in our sleep before—”
“You heard me, Lehash,” Belphegor said as he turned his back and strode through the yard. “Welcome to Aerie, folks,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the abandoned house.
* * *
The prisoner’s eyes opened with a sound very much like late fall leaves crackling underfoot, head bent and gazing down upon hands charred and blackened. He was sitting up against the bars of his cage, his entire body enveloped in a cocoon of sheer agony. His fingers slowly straightened, and through scorched and bleary eyes, he watched as flakes of burnt flesh rained on his lap.
He wasn’t positive when Verchiel had left, but he was glad to see the Powers’ leader gone, for as bored as he was, imprisoned within the cage, he did not care for the angel’s company in the least. High maintenance, that one, he thought, shifting his position in an attempt to get comfortable and accomplishing nothing more than additional waves of excruciating pain. Very temperamental.
The smell of overcooked meat wafted about the inside of the cage and the prisoner was reminded of a feast he had attended in a Serbian village not long before taking up residence in the Crna Reka Monastery. They had been celebrating the birth of a child, and had cooked a pig on a spit over a roaring fire. They had welcomed him to their celebration; a total stranger invited to partake of their happiness. So he did, and for a brief moment was able to forget all that he was, and the horrors for which he was responsible. Moments like that were few and far between in his interminable existence, and he held onto each like the most precious of jewels.
From the corner of his eye he spied movement, a tiny, dark shape scurrying along the wall toward the hanging cage. His friend the mouse had returned. The prisoner leaned back to see outside the cage, and some skin from his neck sloughed off between the bars to sprinkle the floor like black confetti. The air felt cool against his exposed flesh. He was healing, despite the hindering magicks in the metal of the cage.
“Hello,” he croaked, his voice little more than a dry whisper.
The mouse responded with a succession of tiny squeaks.
“I’m fine,” the prisoner answered. He leaned over until he was lying on his side and extended a blackened arm through the bars of the cage. The mouse began to squeak again, and he was touched by the tiny creature’s concern.
“Don’t worry about me,” he told the mouse. “Pain and I have a very unique relationship.”
The animal then sprung from the floor to land on the prisoner’s upturned hand and scrambled up the length of his arm into the cage.
“That’s it,” he cooed, still lying on his side, the mouse squatting before his face, nose, and whiskers twitching curiously.
“I’ll be fine, little one. A bit more time and I’ll be good as new.”
The mouse squeaked once and then again, tilting its head as it studied his condition.
“Yes, it hurts a great deal. But that’s all part of the game. It’s not as if I don’t deserve every teeth-gritting twitch of pain.”
The mouse squeaked, moving closer to his face. It nuzzled affectionately against the burned skin on his nose, gently rubbing it away to expose new flesh, pink and raw.
“No,” the prisoner said. “You just think I’m a good man; you didn’t know me before.”
Memories of times he’d rather have forgotten danced past the theater of his mind, and the prisoner struggled to right himself. His furry companion dug its claws into his shoulder and held on as he braced himself against the bars of the cage.
“What kind of man was I before? Do you really want to know?” he asked with a dry chuckle. The mouse began to clean itself, comfortably perched upon the prisoner’s shoulder.
“That’s a good idea,” he told his friend. “You’re going to feel pretty dirty when I’m done.”
The pain was no worse, and neither was it better, but this was old hat for him. He was a pro when it came to pain. It was always with him, whether his flesh was burned and blackened or he was sleeping peacefully on a woven mat in a Serbian monastery. It was his punishment, and he deserved it.
“You’ve got to promise that once you hear my story, you won’t leave me for some other fallen angel.”
The mouse gave him an encouraging squeak, and the prisoner’s breath rattled in his seared, fluid-filled lungs as he took a deep breath.
“It all started in Heaven,” he began, and the depth of his sorrow streamed from his mouth like blood from a mortal wound.
* * *
“So, where are all these citizens you guys keep talking about?” Aaron asked as they walked down the cracked and uneven sidewalk past one lifeless house after another.
“They’re around,” Lorelei answered with a flip of her snow-white locks. “After the business with that Johiel creep, I don’t think they’re too eager to roll out the red carpet for anybody new. I can’t believe he was going to sell us out just to save his own butt.” She shook her head in disgust as she crossed the street at a crosswalk. “Can’t trust anyone these days,” she said with a warning glance over her shoulder.
“How long has it been here?” Camael asked, scrutinizing the neighborhood with eyes more perceptive than a hawk’s.
“What?” the girl asked. “Aerie? I’ve been here six years, and this is the only place I’ve ever known. Although I hear it’s been in lots of different places: on the side of an active volcano, in an abandoned coal mine … one of the old-timers said he lived inside a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Aerie seems to be wherever the citizens are.”
Camael nodded slowly. “That is why it was so difficult to find,” he said, his eyes still taking it all in. “It does not stay in one location.”
Gabriel was sniffing around the weatherbeaten front steps of one of the abandoned homes; he sounded like the clicks of a Geiger counter searching for radiation. On a house in front of them, a large piece of plywood had been nailed across the entryway where the front door should have been. Crudely spray-painted on the wo
od were the words MY FAMILY DIED FOR LIVING HERE.
“What happened here?” Aaron asked, the message affecting him far more than he would have imagined. It was as if he could feel the grief streaming from each of the painted words as thoughts of his foster parents, their horrible demise, and his own home destroyed by flames flashed through his mind.
Lorelei stopped and looked at the house with him. “During the 1940s and 1950s this property was owned by ChemCord. They were producers of industrial pesticides, acids, organic solvents, and whatnot, and they used to dump their waste here.” She pointed to the street beneath her feet.
“The place stinks, Aaron,” Gabriel said as he relieved himself on the withered, brown remains of a bush in front of the house. “The dirt smells bad—like poison.”
“And that’s helping?” he asked the dog.
“Can’t hurt it,” Gabriel responded haughtily, and continued his exploration.
“He’s right, really,” Lorelei said. “They dumped excess chemicals and by-products in metal drums that they buried all over this property; tons and tons of the stuff.”
They continued to walk, each home taking on new meaning for Aaron. “Then how could they build houses—an entire neighborhood—here?” he asked.
“ChemCord went belly up in 1975 and they began to sell off their assets—including undeveloped land. As far as the guys at ChemCord were concerned, the property was perfectly safe.”
“There is much sadness here,” Camael said from behind them. They turned to see that he was staring at another of the homes. A rusted tricycle lay on its side in front, a kind of marker for the sorrow that emanated from each of the homes. “It has saturated these structures; I can see why Belphegor and the others would be drawn to it.”
“So let me guess,” Aaron began. “They built on the land and people started to get sick.”
Lorelei nodded. “They started construction of Ravenschild Estates in 1978, and the families began to move in during the spring of 1980. Everything was perfect bliss, until the first case of leukemia and then the second, and the third, and then came the birth defects.”