“Please,” the old man begged, the flesh on his face sagging.
Deacon had never felt so strong.
“Please?” Deacon repeated, giving the man a violent shake. “If I had begged for my wife’s life…or mercy for my little boy, would you and your cabal have granted it?”
Stearns looked away, his eyes closing.
“I thought not,” Deacon said. “All those years I spent in the shadow place…all those lonely, lonely years…it led me here…led me to this very special moment.” He gave Stearns another shake.
“Do you hear me…old man?” he asked with joy.
Stearns’ eyes flickered open, hooded at first but growing wider by the second.
“Yes, that’s it,” Deacon urged. “Wake up for me…wake up for that special moment when I take it all from you.”
He was about to flex the full extent of his power, to allow the fires of the Seraphim to surge through his body, down into his hands, to incinerate the sorcerer to cinder and ash. Until he realized that Stearns’ milky gaze was focused not on him, but on something somewhere beyond him.
And his mortal enemy was smiling.
Deacon began to turn but was not fast enough.
Two daggers of metal entered the resurrected flesh of his back, just below his beautiful wings of fire.
There was a whisper in his ear.
“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”
And the fires of the Seraphim surged to greet Remy Chandler.
The power of Heaven flowed through Remy’s hands as he gripped the hilts of the murderous blades.
He screamed as the power entered him, its home for countless centuries.
But its dwelling had changed, and the divine fire of Heaven wondered if this receptacle for its glory would be strong enough to contain it.
Remy sensed its hesitation and urged it forward, even though his body burned with its heat and the scent of his singed flesh filled the air.
“Come into me,” Remy cried out, his voice rough and choked with smoke. “Come into me and be at home.”
And the power did, rushing in to fill the void that had been left by its passing.
Filling Remy close to bursting.
Deacon felt his body grow weaker.
The muscles in his back shriveled and he slid off the dagger’s blades, dropping to his knees on the broken ground. Then he pitched forward, lying on his belly, desperately holding on to what little life energies he had remaining, and was shocked to find himself staring into the equally desiccated face of his rival.
Deacon did not know if his adversary was dead or alive until he saw the sorcerer’s shoulder twitch and his arm begin to move. Fingers splayed, Stearns weakly extended his arm, reaching for Deacon.
Reaching for his face.
Too weak to move, Deacon could only watch in horror as his enemy’s hand grew closer, horrible puckered mouths, like multiple versions of his grandfather’s toothless mouth, hungrily descending.
Deacon wanted to scream but he did not have it within him to do so.
Stearns’ hand fell upon him and the mouths greedily began to feed on what precious little he had left.
And suddenly Deacon found himself transported to another place.
It took him but a second to realize when and where he was.
It was August 6, 1945, and he was standing in the center of a road that led to Hiroshima.
He looked up to the sky, closing his eyes, waiting.
There came a flash so bright that he could see it, even though his eyes were still closed.
And a sound followed that could have been the sound of Creation.
But he knew, in fact, it was the sound of the end.
Remy felt as though he’d been born again.
The Seraphim was whole once more—he was whole once more.
But something was wrong.
Remy’s body swelled with power, his every muscle burning, throwing off waves of intense heat. He tried to rein it in, to calm its fury, but something stirred it to action, and suddenly he knew the cause.
The golem child—Angelina—had filled him with the power of life, and this was what the holy fire was feeding on. The fires were stoked too high.
The sustenance of life was the most splendid and delicious of energies, and he was drunk on its potential. Remy struggled to focus, but he was high on the power that coursed through him.
He needed to do something, to find a way to alleviate this dangerous overflow. His gaze moved across the blighted rooftop before him, falling on the most horrific of sights.
The nearly skeletal Algernon Stearns lay atop the body of Konrad Deacon, feeding on what residual life force still remained within his enemy’s withered corpse.
As if sensing the power in Remy’s stare, Stearns raised his gaze to him.
There was hunger in the old sorcerer’s eyes.
And this time, Remy was happy to oblige him.
He surged upward with a single flap of his powerful wings, dropping down in front of the cadaverous figure. Fear had momentarily surpassed hunger as Stearns looked at him, but that was quickly dispersed as Remy moved closer and extended his hand.
It was like dangling a bloody piece of meat before a hungry dog. At first there was some wariness, and then all sense of caution was jettisoned as the hunger got the better of him and Stearns reached up, wrapping his fingers around Remy’s hand.
The sensation was nauseating, and Remy had to make a conscious effort not to yank his hand away in utter disgust. He could feel the mouths moving against his flesh, sucking away the excessive energies that threatened to overtake him. The intensity of the power that rushed through his body was beginning to diminish, and he could at last begin to focus.
Finally feeling a sense of calm, a sense of peace, Remy tried to take his hand away from the energy vampire, but was met with considerable resistance, the eager mouths on Stearns’ hands sucking all the faster, attempting to take even more than what was being offered.
It was exactly what Remy would have expected from such a creature, and why he had decided to do what he was about to.
Stearns brought his other hand around for even more of the angel’s power, but Remy was faster, snatching the sorcerer’s wrist before he could take hold.
The sorcerer grew frantic, desperate to partake of that much more of the Seraphim’s precious life energies.
But Remy had decided that he had had enough.
Stearns must have seen something in Remy’s eyes, something that told him that he had fed for the last time. In a last-ditch effort, magick exploded from his fingertips, bolts of crisscrossing energy causing the ground before him to detonate explosively as he attempted to flee.
But the Seraphim was not hindered by the magickal display, soaring up and over the mystical conflagration to descend behind the sorcerer.
“Please,” was the last word to escape his mouth, as Remy reached out for him. He grabbed Stearns by the head, and violently snapped his neck like a dry twig.
Remy felt little remorse for the magick user as he released his twitching body, letting it drop limply to the broken ground. There were other, more pressing matters that required his—
“Remy?”
He heard his name carried across the rooftop and turned, in all his angelic glory, toward the sound. He was stunned by what he saw.
At first he thought it some kind of trick, some last bit of magickal mischief perpetrated by the sorcerers that had turned his life around of late, but soon came to realize that she was real.
Ashley.
He was overjoyed to see her and about to approach when he saw the expression on her face.
How long has she been standing there? What did she see me do?
It was an expression of fear.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
Ashley felt something inside her brain let go.
It wasn’t that she had been kidnapped and taken away from everything she loved…. It wasn’t that she had just killed so
meone, hacking him with a sword until he was bloody and unmoving….
It was stepping from the shadows, Squire by her side, to see him.
Him. My Remy.
At least, she thought it was him, but why did he look that way? Why was he glowing as if he were blazing hot, and wearing armor, and…
Are those wings?
She was still overjoyed to see him, and was about to cry out when she saw—heard—what he did to the person he was struggling with.
As the muffled snap of the person’s neck filled her ears, something went inside her as well, and she knew that nothing—no matter how hard she wanted it to be—would ever be the same again.
“Remy.”
She hadn’t even known that she had spoken; his name was just suddenly there, dropping from her lips like the twitching body that fell from her friend’s grasp.
He had been looking toward the open sky at the swirling black whirlpool.
Here was something else that had changed: She’d never seen a whirlpool in the sky before, and she had to wonder what else had changed in the world since she had been gone….
Or have these things always been here and I just couldn’t see them? It was something to think about.
As a little girl, she had always wondered about the life Dorothy had led after coming back from Oz…. How had it changed her? She couldn’t be the same old Dorothy anymore.
Remy was looking at her now, and he seemed happy to see her, but the way he looked…and what he had done…
Ashley could see it on his face. He was actually coming toward her when he stopped.
She’d never been very good at hiding how she was feeling, and right now she was terrified of him…of what he was.
Maybe it was just like in the movie, and the scarecrow was Hunk the farmhand, and the Wicked Witch was actually Miss Gulch.
Remy Chandler was actually…
What is he?
The word was suddenly there, and there was no doubting it was right.
Angel.
But she’d never seen an angel so…
Scary.
She was going to try to speak to him when something happened to stop her. The thing in the sky—that swirling, whirlpool thing—it was getting bigger.
And she thought that it might be trying to swallow the world.
The thing in the sky screamed and swirled in all its fury, bringing darkness as it grew, blotting out the sun.
And with the darkness there came shadow.
More and more shadows.
It was not hard for Remy to look away from the girl. The look of fear in her eyes was enough to dissuade him as he turned his gaze to something not as troubling: the rupture that had been created between two realities. The pull of the maelstrom was getting stronger, the hole tearing larger with the passing minutes. He could hear panic in the streets below, imagining the horrors that might be emerging from the darkness spawned by Deacon’s return to his world of birth.
But it was not only the people on the streets who faced danger from the shadows.
A beast of black flowed out from beneath a section of rubble, hungry for the taste of angel. Surprised by the attack, Remy fell backward to the ground as the shadow monster pounced on him. Its claws were like ice, sinking into the exposed flesh of his arms. He saw from the right corner of his vision the hobgoblin coming to his aid, leaving Ashley alone.
“No,” he cried out, attempting to heave the thrashing animal from atop him. “I’ve got this…. Don’t leave her side.”
The goblin warrior obliged him, backing away to stand before his charge, as Remy attempted to thwart this latest attack on him from the realm of shadows.
And if something was not done about the opening in the sky above, it would be far from the last.
He got the flat of his forearm beneath the slathering animal’s throat, holding its snapping, black jaws at bay, and was forcing it from him when there came an explosion of gunfire, and its head temporarily transformed into a Rorschach pattern before rolling off of him to the ground, where its mass was swallowed up by yet another bottomless pool of darkness.
Remy jumped to his feet in time to see Francis and Angus coming across the wreckage of the rooftop toward him.
The passage above their heads had grown larger still, expanding across the sky, the shadow realm now pouring into this reality.
“You know that isn’t good, right?” Angus said to him, pointing up into the sky. Francis and the sorcerer had now joined the hobgoblin and Ashley.
“Is there anything you can do?” Remy asked the sorcerer, hoping for a quick fix but already knowing the answer.
“I’ve got nothing,” Angus said grimly over the sound of the shrieking anomaly in the sky above.
Remy peered up into the eye of the unnatural storm, shielding his vision from the flying dust and debris, and looked into the heart of darkness.
He felt a stirring at the center of his being, the reality of what he was—where he had come from—roused to act.
He was the embodiment of God’s light—which drove away the darkness—and he knew what he must do.
As if sensing the realization he had come to, the center of the vortex grew suddenly larger. With an ear-piercing cry like a living thing, the whorl of the gyre became faster.
Larger pieces of stone and glass were now being sucked up from the rooftop, and he could see that his friends were having difficulty staying on their feet.
There was no more time for hesitation.
“It’s time for you all to go,” Remy yelled over the storm.
They all began to balk, and he spread his wings and began to flap them furiously, adding to the winds and driving them back.
Francis was the only one who did not move, standing his ground, gun still in hand.
“What do you think you’re doing?” he asked Remy.
“I’m ending this before it’s too late.”
“Is there anything that I can do?”
“Get them out of here,” Remy said. “Keep them safe until it’s over.”
Francis knew what he had to do; they’d always had an understanding about these things. Remy turned away from his friend, knowing full well that he would do what Remy had asked of him.
Remy couldn’t think of them anymore, only of what needed to be done. Springing off the rooftop, his wings beat the air, propelling him skyward, fighting the insane winds as he allowed himself to be sucked up into the cyclonic force.
He did not fight it as he was spun around and around, inexorably pulled toward the center of the widening gyre. This was what his life had felt like of late—slowly being pulled toward the eye of storm, no matter how much he fought, inevitably being dragged toward the center.
But he wasn’t going to fight it anymore.
For at the center was solution.
Remy felt the cold of the mouth as it yawned wider to accept him, and for the first time in a long while, he was completely at peace. His natures—his human and angelic—were as one, knowing what needed to be done.
What the Almighty would want them to do.
And as the darkness took him, he heard the words so often attributed to his Heavenly Father.
Let there be light.
And there was light.
An old woman pushing a shopping cart filled with bottles and cans was coming toward him, terror in her eyes. Something was after her, something that jumped from one patch of shadow to the next as it stalked its prey.
Mulvehill saw this and acted, guessing where the beast would next appear and aiming his pistol accordingly. He smiled at the fact that he had been right as the lionlike monster sprang out of a shadow cast by the overhanging sign of an Indian restaurant that he frequented.
His pistol barked twice, the shots hitting the unearthly animal in its muscular side, sending it thrashing to the ground in death. Mulvehill ran to the old woman, who had fallen. Her brimming cart had tipped over, spilling its contents onto the sidewalk.
The shadow beast had cra
wled onto its feet, considering them with hungry eyes as it bled darkness onto the sidewalk.
“C’mon, then,” Mulvehill said in defiance of the monster. “I’m not afraid of you.”
As if accepting his challenge, the monstrous thing sprang across the expanse of sidewalk, as Mulvehill raised his weapon once more to fire.
And that was when the sky became filled with a sudden brilliance and the threat of the beast was gone like the passing of a nightmare with the coming of dawn.
The light was like nothing he had ever experienced before, permeating every crack, crevice, and corner of the city where the darkness could hide.
He could feel it even inside himself, burning away any despair and fear that still remained and filling him up with fire.
Filling him up with hope.
Eyes watering from the intensity of the flare, Mulvehill’s vision cleared and he found himself making his way into the center of the street across from Hermes Plaza, where he gazed up to the desolated top floor of the building.
But the sky above it was as blue as the sea and twice as calm, and the shadows around him were just shadows.
He didn’t know where the words came from. They just came, bubbling up from one of those places locked inside the brain where things like that were stored away.
And God saw the light, and it was good. And God divided the light from the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Remy knew where he was even before he opened his eyes.
He could hear the sound of the crashing surf, the smell of the ocean invigorating him as it came into his lungs.
It was a Cape Cod beach that didn’t really exist, an amalgam of many of the Cape beaches and other seaside places that he and Madeline had enjoyed in her lifetime.
He had created this place in his mind as a kind of tribute to her after she had died, and would come here often when things were tough and he wanted—needed—to see her again.
It was foggy here today, heavy, moist air cutting visibility down to mere feet. Despite the gloominess of it all, Madeline and he had always loved these days, walking for hours hand in hand, never knowing what was in front of them in the shifting haze.