In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel

  “Make him watch,” the sorcerer ordered before turning his attention back to Armaros and the other Grigori.

  “Are we ready?” Stearns asked.

  “We are,” Armaros answered.

  The world went deathly quiet. Armaros leaned in toward the small child, his lips dangerously close to her ear, as the remaining Grigori joined hands.

  And suddenly all Remy could hear was the whine of the television cameras’ auto focus as they fixed the child in their robotic sights.

  And the Grigori leader’s whispering voice…

  “Hear the words of the Lord.”

  The wards of protection cast around the plaza were doing their job.

  The vintage car, engine racing like a turbulent ocean surf as it drove at the Hermes Building in a breakneck pace, felt as though it had struck an invisible wall.

  The Lincoln came to a screaming halt, the shining chrome bumper and front end of the awesome car buckling. Francis and Angus were like rag dolls in the front seat, whipped viciously forward but prevented from continuing their journey through the broad expanse of windshield by their straining seat belts.

  Leona was angry. The living car did not stop for long, its thick tires digging into the brick and spinning wildly, filling the air with the acrid smoke of burning rubber as she moved inexorably forward toward the building.

  It was one supernatural force against the other.

  The air was filled with so much smoke and noise that Francis had no idea what was truly happening. Angus sat perfectly still, holding on to his seat for dear life as the car bucked and bounced, the sounds of twisting metal like a symphony of destruction in their ears.

  This can go one of three ways, Francis thought as he continued to grip the warm wooden steering wheel. Leona could be totally decimated, or the living car could show the wards who was truly queen shit by getting them inside the building, or the two unmovable forces could cause one helluva explosion, leaving Hermes Plaza with a decent-sized crater that could be used as a swimming pool in the summer.

  The car began to thrash like a Jack Russell with its fangs buried deep in a rat, giving it that special shake to snap its neck.

  There were bursts of fire and the smell of brimstone and the sounds of screaming somewhere off in the distance. For a second Francis believed that the wards had won, that Leona just didn’t have what it took to beat the protective spells.

  But then her engine began to roar and the tires spun even faster, and Leona lurched forward, seemingly shucking off the destructive effects of the sorcerous handiwork that should have been strong enough to keep them out.

  But never underestimate the craftsmanship of demonic ingenuity.

  Leona’s cries were deafening; it sounded like all the engines of every NASCAR race ever run had been spooled together to create one horrendous clamor. Her spinning tires were finally able to gain purchase, and the vehicle leapt forward, battering through the revolving doors in an explosion of metal and glass.

  And as soon as she was inside, her engine died, cutting out with a sputter.

  Francis knew that the car had done the nearly impossible and that was all they could expect from her.

  “We’re in,” he said, already swinging open the driver’s-side door. Angus moved as he did, extracting his bulk from the vehicle.

  Alarms wailed and an artificial rain from the sprinklers fell upon them. Francis could hear scuffling in the smoke and dust and saw movement toward them.

  “Trunk!” he yelled, slamming his hand down on the back of the vehicle, and Leona managed one more act for them, popping the trunk and allowing them access to their gear.

  Shots rang out, pinging off the open trunk as both Francis and Angus reached inside and readied themselves for the task ahead.

  Francis tossed a handful of the walnut-sized grenades first, the explosions of magick canceling out any sorcery that was being used in the lobby. Then he moved around the car, pistol in hand, firing one shot after another, taking out the stunned golem sentries. Angus backed him up, handgun firing from one hand while the other wove powerful new magicks to repel their attackers.

  “Do you think the elevators are still working?” Angus asked, waving his hand in a circle and creating a mini twister that spun four of the guards in the air before slamming them into the gray marble wall beside the reception desk.

  “Can’t see why not,” Francis said, firing into the face of a golem whose body exploded in a cloud of dirt.

  An engine roar captured his attention, and Francis turned to see Leona, battered and broken, backing out of the lobby.

  “Thanks, sweetie!” he called after her. He could see the flashing of police lights outside and hear the sounds of angry voices screaming for the car to stop, but Leona didn’t listen. A distraction; something else he’d have to thank her for later.

  “Shall we go find Remy?” Francis asked, throwing the weapons-filled duffel bag over his shoulder as he stepped through the open doors of the elevator. He stabbed at the button that would take them up to the studio level, but the door refused to close.

  He looked at the pained expression in the sorcerer’s face.

  “Sorry, Chubs,” the former Guardian angel said, leaving the elevator with the dejected Angus in tow.

  “Looks like we’re using the stairs.”

  The scared little girl had been replaced.

  No longer was a sickly child hiding beneath the covers; now an almost-regal figure sat, back perfectly straight, and spoke directly to the cameras that were pointed at her.

  “Hello, my name is Angelina Hayward,” she began, a slight distortion to her voice, evidence that the power wielded by the Grigori was flowing through her. “And I am about to deliver unto you a message from the Heavenly Father.”

  Remy struggled fruitlessly in the grip of the golem sentries, fighting to get to his feet, attempting to find and rekindle even the slightest bit of angelic fire that might have been left by the sorcerer Deacon.

  “No!” he screamed, fighting and thrashing, even though it felt as if his limbs might snap like twigs. “No…you can’t do this!”

  The child was distracted by his outburst, turning her gaze from the camera to him.

  “Don’t let them make you do this,” Remy implored her. “It isn’t a message from God; it’s something else entirely.”

  A silent nod from Stearns was all the sentries needed to begin punching Remy with their flesh-covered fists of stone. But over the sounds of his vicious beating, he could hear the child questioning his outburst.

  “What does he mean that it isn’t a message from God?” she asked.

  “Hush, child,” Armaros soothed. “Prepare yourself for…”

  “Hurry!” Stearns bellowed. “We can’t afford this distraction…. We can’t afford to lose any eyes.”

  “She will speak the words when it is time,” the Grigori leader responded in a calm yet threatening tone.

  Remy tried to remain conscious, tried to cry out, but the fists were like hammers and he found it harder and harder keep the darkness at bay.

  Maybe oblivion was best right now.

  But the thought just enraged him.

  The blows continued to fall and suddenly he welcomed them, taking each hurtful strike and using the pain as fuel for his rage. He may not have the divine fire at his beck and call, but it did not change what he was.

  Seraphim.

  He’d tried to hide it for so very long, so it would not remind him of what he had lost.

  Heaven.

  Yet it was always there, waiting beneath the veneer of humanity that he had constructed. It had always known what he truly was, even though Remy had liked to think otherwise.

  Seraphim.

  And of late he had come to accept this, finally understanding that there was no way to ignore his divine nature, no way to ignore the soldier of Heaven that lived beneath his skin.

  We are one and the same.

  Sometimes he needed a little reminder of that, something to st
ir the memories of where he’d been…where he’d come from…

  And what I’ve done.

  Remy was a warrior, and he could not even count the number of lives he had extinguished on the battlefields of Heaven in his Creator’s name.

  Remy remembered who he was—what I was—

  Warrior. Killer. Murderer of my own kind.

  No matter how painful.

  He remembered the long-ago past with a surge of anger, the memory of the horrors committed in the name of his master inflaming his blood and summoning a fury that could not be bridled.

  In the here and now, he surged to his feet, an inhuman bellow of rage escaping from a place deep within him. He yanked his arm away from one of his attackers, bringing his elbow up into its face before it could grab him again. The force of the blow was tremendous, caving in the artificial man’s face and revealing the inhumanity beneath. But the warrior was already on to the next, taking hold of his front, lifting him up from the floor, and hurling his great weight across the room with ease.

  The cries of his foes were frantic, the Grigori, clutching their tarnished blades, already on their way to him. The warrior’s nature was still in full control, and he searched for a way to defend himself. His eyes fell on the weapon holstered at the waist of a fallen golem guard. Remy dove for the gun, yanking it from its resting place, and started to fire.

  Bullets connected with the fallen angels’ flesh, driving them back, injuring but not killing the creatures.

  Finally he saw the opportunity that he was waiting for, a way to stop this insanity. He saw the little girl sitting up in her princess bed.

  Remy aimed the gun…

  But hesitated.

  He knew she wasn’t real, nothing more than magick and clay, but at the moment, he saw a little girl….

  The magickal blast struck him square, enveloping him in a cocoon of electrical agony. Remy screamed, his body experiencing pain down to a cellular level.

  Stearns stood there, arm outstretched, magick streaming from his fingertips.

  “I’ve had just about enough of you,” the sorcerer said, casting him off to float above the room in a bubble of torment. What made it all the worse was that Remy could still see, watching it all through tears of agony.

  And there wasn’t a goddamn thing he could do about it.

  Stearns felt himself growing weaker as the terrible hunger intensified. It was as if his altered body knew of the coming feast and was purposely expending vast amounts of magickal energy so that it would be fed all the quicker.

  Holding the troublesome spectator aloft, Stearns decided he must take the bull by the horns if this procedure was to commence in a timely fashion.

  “Armaros,” he bellowed, while motioning to those who served him in the control room above the studio. “If you would be so kind as to continue.”

  The injured Grigori, clutching their bleeding wounds, returned to their master’s side. Armaros glared at him, but returned to the child, who appeared to be in shock, cowering on the bed. He stroked her hair, whispering something that Stearns could not quite hear, but her back straightened and her eyes suddenly stared straight ahead as the cameras came to life, ready to capture the message she was about to herald.

  Stearns saw that it was actually about to happen, and double-checked the attachments that would bring him the power he so desperately craved.

  And then his eyes went to the man held within a sphere of magickal power, hanging above the studio floor, his body wracked with pain that should have rendered him lifeless, but somehow he remained conscious, staring with eyes absent of hope.

  “Hear the words of the Lord,” Angelina Hayward proclaimed as the angels of the Grigori leaned toward her, filling her ears with their message.

  The child grew suddenly statue tense and her eyes began to glow as if an inner light had come alive. She opened her mouth and light streamed out, but there was also a sound the likes of which Algernon Stearns had never before heard.

  It was the saddest of songs.

  A lament of the past, but also of the future.

  And as the first notes of the song began—the first words of a divine message whose meaning meant only death, the first strains of power began to flow into the child and into the machines beneath the bed.

  And Algernon Stearns truly understood the meaning of the word God.

  If only for an instant.

  Steven Mulvehill had been raised Roman Catholic.

  As a child, and even into his late teens, he had attended Mass every Sunday, had gone to Sunday school, had received all the blessed sacraments, and had even been married in the Catholic Church.

  But he’d never really thought of himself as a believer. He went through all the motions but could never truly commit to the idea of a guiding force in the universe, especially since he was a homicide cop, especially after all the badness he had seen.

  How could there be any supernatural guidance with the kinds of things he saw going on every hour of the day, and not even just in his city, but all over the world?

  It all seemed so terrible…so cruel.

  So the older he got, the less he went through the motions, and the further he drifted away from the faith he had practiced since childhood.

  Then he met Remy Chandler and he learned that there actually was a powerful force out there in the universe, a Creator of all things; that there really were such things as angels and devils, Heaven and Hell. And one would think that after all those years of wondering—questioning a faith that had been part of his life since he was old enough to walk—that would have meant something special to him.

  It’s true. It’s all true.

  Yet all it did was make him afraid.

  Steven had been enticed by the world that Remy Chandler had hinted at, but he’d managed to keep it at arm’s length. He didn’t want to know because he wasn’t sure he could handle the truth.

  And the verdict was in: He couldn’t. It was too much for his little human mind to wrap itself around.

  Now he couldn’t even bring himself to talk to his friend or go out into a world that he now knew was vastly different and far more dangerous than he could ever hope to realize.

  It terrified him, and that fear made him angry.

  It made him angry that he had not yet gone back to work, that he had sustained injuries in his confrontation with something not of this world, something from a world that Remy Chandler, up until then, had kept him safe from, something that had almost killed him.

  Something that had pulled back the curtain and forced him to look at a world that he did not want to know about.

  And now he hid, locked inside his apartment, venturing outside only to buy the bare essentials—cigarettes, whiskey, microwave dinners—dreading when he would run out of something and have to venture into the world again.

  Mulvehill was disgusted with himself, but it did not make the fear go away.

  He guessed he was looking for some sort of answer, something that would tell him that everything was going to be all right, which explained why he found himself sitting in front of the television set in the middle of the afternoon, waiting to hear a little girl speak a message that she was supposedly getting from the Big Guy Upstairs.

  There had been some sort of technical difficulties and the newscasters were wasting time until things were up and running again. He’d heard all about the little girl and how she’d been in a coma for years, until a few weeks ago when she unexpectedly awoke and started talking about how God was going to speak through her.

  He remembered the Steven Mulvehill of a few months back, and how he would have scoffed at something like this, but after seeing what he’d seen—experiencing what he had—maybe God really did have something to say to the world.

  And maybe it would be enough to give him the courage to leave the house again and get on with his life.

  He’d gone to the kitchen to get some more ice for his second whiskey of the afternoon when he heard one of the newscasters say tha
t they were returning to little Angelina. Mulvehill plucked three cubes from the tray in the freezer and hurried back to the living room.

  Sitting down on his sofa, he reached for the bottle of Seagram’s and was just about to pour two fingers into the glass when his eyes touched on the screen.

  The little girl’s face filled the television, and he was nearly brought to tears by the beauty of her. He couldn’t have pulled his eyes from her even if he had wanted to; it was almost as if she had gone inside his head, the message she was about to speak spoken only to him.

  One after another, the Grigori drew their weapons.

  The receiver was ready, open to broadcast her message—their message—to the waiting faithful.

  Armaros gazed around the studio one final time, taking in the last sights he would see before his tortured existence was finally brought to a close.

  The sorcerer stood ready, a look of euphoria on his face as he awaited the flow of death energy. And the pained expression of the Seraphim, Remy Chandler, imprisoned within a sphere of magick—he could see the terror in the angel’s eyes.

  “It is for the good of them all,” Armaros proclaimed, positioning the tarnished blade above his heart.

  “Don’t do it!” Remy managed, but it was too late for Armaros and his followers to be persuaded otherwise.

  Now the Grigori would deliver their message. The Lord God is watching and He is very disappointed in what humans have become. But with their sacrifice, the human race still had a chance to reach its full potential.

  “Brothers,” Armaros said, addressing the others of his host. They, too, held their blades, poised to strike, ready to end their lives in a flash of brilliance—a flash that would touch those who were watching and listening.

  A flash that would end the Grigori’s lives and the lives of those waiting to hear Heaven’s message.

  “The curtain falls.”

  And with those words, the Grigori plunged the knives into their chests, piercing their hearts.

  Their final message, their final cries flowing into the child, and from her…

  Out into the world.