Fire in his hands, Remy was ready for just about anything, watching the angel with a cautious eye. The Seraphim whispered in the back of his mind: Kill your enemy. Do it now. . . . But Remy didn’t feel that this was necessary, which just made his warrior side all the more frantic.
Zophiel reached up, removing one of the burning spears sticking from his throat, and then the other. Angel blood flowed freely, running down the front of once golden armor in glistening, dark rivulets.
Attack. Attack. Attack. Attack, the Seraphim urged, but Remy stayed his hand.
Swaying as he stood, the Cherubim hefted his mighty sword. It now glowed brighter—hotter—in his grasp, happy to be back in its master’s possession.
It had been a very long time since Remy last held a weapon that he had bonded with, a weapon as much a part of him as any appendage. Flashes of the Great War exploded in his mind, and of the blood-caked sword that he had dropped upon the battlefield when the war was done.
When he was done.
“I am at an end,” the Cherubim weakly gurgled, holding the burning blade up so that he could look upon it. “I can do no more.”
Zophiel whipped the blade forward, tongues of flame leaping down its tarnished length to lick eagerly toward him.
Remy recoiled, but did not attack.
“Take it,” Zophiel commanded, releasing the large sword from his grip, letting it land at Remy’s feet. The fire that covered the blade dimmed as it lay there. “If the warrior’s heart still beats within your breast, you must rouse it, for the Kingdom of Heaven is threatened by things most foul.”
Zophiel slowly slid to his knees, the life going out of him as the blood from his injuries continued to flow.
“A cancer grows in the bosom of the Garden,” the Cherubim warned, his voice weaker. “A malignancy that cannot be allowed to spread.”
On his knees, Zophiel’s once fearsome form grew more and more still, as fire as well as blood streamed from his wounds.
“Stop him, Remiel of the host Seraphim,” Zophiel begged as his body was slowly consumed by the fire of God leaving his dying body.
“Stop Malachi before it all crumbles to ruin.”
The words broke loose from Zophiel’s lips in a final whisper, the white-hot flames licking at the flesh of his body, surging to engulf his entire form in an inferno.
Remy watched as the fire burned white, temporarily blinding him with its intensity, before it receded, growing softer, until nothing remained but the burn mark where the Cherubim had knelt upon the wooden floor.
That and the still smoldering sword lying at Remy’s feet.
The Garden was in pain.
She had felt the illness growing inside of her for quite some time, felt it writhe as it slowly grew over the ages to maturation.
The sickness was inside . . . beneath her cool, fertile earth, feeding off the life energies of this vibrant Paradise.
Suckling upon the roots of the Tree.
It was new life that grew, dangerous life that yearned to be born.
Eden had tried to thwart their growth, making her skin shake and shift, inciting the more primitive life that lived upon and inside her to feed freely on this malignant invader.
But the illness was created to be strong, even in its earliest stages.
She had attempted to communicate with the multiple life-forms gestating within her bosom, wanting to know their purpose, and she learned that they had been created to survive, to usurp what had come before.
The Garden knew that this was wrong, that the things nestled inside her should not come to be, but she was helpless.
Those who could have protected her were long since banished.
She felt their presence out there in the ether, and she had reached out, singing for them to notice her, but they had been too far away to hear her voice.
To hear her pleas.
Until now.
After drifting for so very, very long, she was near her children again. There were more of them now: more to hear her cries for help.
Weakened by the goings-on inside her, the Garden called out as loudly as she could, hoping they would hear her call.
Hoping they would come as she grew nearer to them, and their world.
That they would come to the aid of their mother.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The sword cried out to him.
Remy gazed down to the floor, listening to the blade’s pleas. It was calling to him—begging him—to pick it up.
It wanted to tell him what it knew; it wanted him to be its new master.
He felt the Seraphim stir, the song of the blade incredibly powerful. It had been too long since the divine being had held a weapon forged in the fires of Heaven.
Before he could even question the action, Remy bent down, fingers wrapping around the sword’s hilt.
It was like taking hold of a live wire. His mind exploded in a searing flash of white, images forming from the fire that spread across the surface of his brain.
He saw the Garden. . . . No, he felt the Garden in every way that was possible. He saw through the eyes of the sword . . . through the eyes of Zophiel.
Something was wrong there. War was on the horizon, the air tinged with the acrid smell of blood, growing stronger as it drifted on the thick currents of air.
But there was something else. Something that had begun to affect the thick vegetation of the Garden paradise, tainting the earth beneath the sentry’s feet. The blade was warning him, driving him through the thick underbrush toward what would desecrate this most holy of places.
He emerged from the jungle to stand before the Tree.
The poison was there, and the Garden called out to him.
And then he saw that he was not the only of God’s divine creatures there.
The elder called Malachi was there at the Tree, and in his arms he held something that squirmed with life.
Something that did not belong.
The elder explained that everything was as it should be, though the sentry felt that something was wrong. Something was horribly, horribly wrong. Looking upon the pale thing that undulated in the elder’s arms, he felt a sense of revulsion, that what he was observing was not of God’s design.
Of God’s plan.
He was about to question the foul thing’s existence, but he did not have the chance. The elder moved faster than the speed of thought, a flash of burning dagger the last thing Zophiel saw before it plunged through the bone of his face and into his brain.
Turning the ordered world of the Lord God to madness.
There was a fire in Zophiel’s mind, a ravenous conflagration that consumed everything that he had ever known, replacing it with a jabbering insanity.
He could not remember what had led him to this, only that he was filled with a bloodlust that could not be quenched.
He must find what was responsible for this . . . and it must burn, and maybe then he would have the answers that eluded him.
Destruction would be his sustenance, feeding the madness that enshrouded him, and hopefully satisfying it so that one day, his sanity would be returned to him.
The images came in a torrential flow, the sentry’s ability to process what was happening, and the world around him, now nothing more than a jumble of sights, sounds, and smells.
For a moment Remy—Remiel—remembered who he was and that these were not his experiences, but the experiences of the Cherubim who had been given the sacred task of guarding Eden, but the recollections came furiously and the Seraphim was almost drowned in their relentless intensity.
The fires of madness raced across the surface of his mind, and Zophiel tried desperately to hold on to some recollection of the evil that threatened the Garden.