“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 stir 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.