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 that 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.
Rita Dollans moved her wheelchair closer to the television screen so that she could see. Her body had been racked with rheumatoid arthritis for years and she had great difficulty getting the chair precisely where she wanted it, but she managed.
And now she eagerly waited to hear what the Lord had to say.
Denise Kelleher cradled her crying infant in her arms, rocking him ever so gently. She wanted to hear the message, and as she bent forward to pick up the remote from the coffee table, as the little girl’s face filled the screen, and the child prepared to speak…
Her baby went quiet.
Almost as if he wanted to hear the message, too.
Dillon Ratner looked at his watch as he sat in the waiting room of the Toyota dealership. He’d been there for well over two hours. He’d brought a book and had read several chapters, but was now tired of reading and tired of waiting.
He was about to get up and check on the progress of his Camry when he noticed how quiet it had become in the dealership, everyone around him transfixed to the image of a little girl on the sixty-inch flat screen that hung on the wall.
Curious, he reached up, pulling the headphones that were attached to his iPhone from his ears.
And was assailed by the message.
The message had started to crawl into Peter Vestmore’s mind. He hadn’t any intention of even listening to the sickly-looking kid, wanting instead to check on an eBay bid he’d made for an original The Good, the Bad and the Ugly movie poster, but there was something in the little girl’s eyes, something in the strange, foreign words that she was speaking.
Something that made him start to scream and the blood begin to gush from his nose, now that he had looked.
Unable to look away.
And the message of the dying Grigori poured out over the ether, transmitted through the child and into a digital signal picked up by Algernon Stearns’ cameras, broadcast to a waiting world.
The message reached out to those who were watching and listening, grabbing them in a steely grip, as it started to fill their brains with the sad lament of the Grigori’s passing.
And all who saw and heard this mournful dirge were touched as they had never been touched before.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Even trapped within the sphere of magickal energy, Remy could feel what was happening.
He could feel the Grigori dying, their life energies leaking out of their bodies, their psychic communication-their terrorist act against an unsuspecting public-flowing from their dying minds and into the child-shaped golem and out across the ether.
It was the most horrible thing that he had ever seen, and he had seen much on this world since he’d decided to walk it.
The child had begun to speak…
The machines beneath her bed had started to hum ominously, gauges and dials illuminated as the first inklings of death energy began to flow.
The sorcerer gasped at his first taste, face twisted in ecstasy as the trickle of accumulated life force was delivered. His exoskeleton sparked and glowed with unearthly power, the hum of the great machines growing louder and louder, like a hive of angry bees.
Remy again attempted to summon what strength that he could, pushing against his magickal confines in the hopes that he might free himself to do something- anything — to prevent this travesty.
The magick struck him down once more, like the crack of a million whips on his nervous system. The pain was everywhere, and he dropped back to the floor of the energy sphere that held him aloft.
He lay on his stomach, too weak to rise, waiting, when he noticed something.
It was the flicker of lights that caught his attention.
Remy watched the figures in the control booth start to scramble. He perked up, watching, waiting for what could be an opportunity.
The lights went dim again, the hum and pulse of the machinery beneath the child’s bed sounding a bit strained as its flow of power began to be tested.
It’s the power, Remy thought, pushing himself up into a sitting position. Something was straining the electricity to the building-to the studio.
The look on Stearns’ face was priceless: ecstasy replaced with shocked surprise, blending into absolute rage. If Remy hadn’t felt like a hundred miles of bad road, he would have laughed.