Remy breathed in and out, holding on to the power-to the myriad emotions that threatened to push him over the edge.
“But that’s all right,” she told him. “As long as we were able to stop this…”
The building violently shook, dust and pieces of ceiling raining down, as the shadows around them unnaturally started to expand.
“As long as you are able to stop this.”
He felt compelled to hold her as life ran out, and he knelt down amid the rubble and put his arms around her.
“The angels’ message was a lie,” she told him sleepily. “But I heard another.”
Remy looked down at the artificial child, startled to see that her childlike features were now completely gone. It was like he was looking at the beginning of a clay sculpture, the rudimentary shape implying that it would soon resemble the human form.
“There was another message,” Angelina said, a blocky hand of clay now reaching up to rest on his shoulder. “And I think it really was from Him…from God.”
Remy was silent, feeling nothing but sadness as this special life-form readied to leave the world.
“And He told me what to do,” she whispered softly. Eyes that were little more than dark impressions in the clay but still somehow able to convey emotion gazed up at him.
“He told me to give it to you,” she said. “To give you the power…that you would know…”
The child went quiet then, and he knew that she was no longer with him. Gently he set the primitive clay shape dressed in a little girl’s pajamas down on the ground, showing as much tenderness as he would have shown any once-living thing that had just sacrificed so very much.
The battle continued to rage on the floor above as well as inside him. The Seraphim inebriated on the sustenance of life wanted to join the fray, to smite the wicked for what they had done.
But the Seraphim was blind to the true strength of the power it would be up against, power that easily rivaled its own. He needed to be careful in how he dealt with this.
Leaving the child’s body to the encroaching shadows, he climbed the broken steps toward the battlefield, Angelina’s final words echoing at the forefront of his mind.
He told me to give it to you…that you would know.
As Remy reached the studio floor and witnessed the terror that was unfolding there, he hoped that the child’s faith in him…that His faith in him was not in vain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
He hadn’t expected to wake up facedown on his living room floor, the droning sound of a television test signal buzzing in his ears.
Steven Mulvehill rolled onto his back and sat up, a wave of dizziness and intense nausea almost putting him down again. As he sat there, he felt a tightness on the skin beneath his nose and carefully brought his fingers there to find a wet, tacky substance that was revealed to be drying blood.
“What the fuck?” he muttered. Sure that the swimming in his head had passed, he attempted to stand. Swaying slightly, he stared at the television screen and at the message displayed there: We are temporarily experiencing technical difficulties. Thank you for your patience!
He remembered the child on the TV and how she had begun to speak, and then he remembered nothing. In his gut he knew that she-the child-had something to do with what had happened.
Mulvehill walked drunkenly from the living room into the kitchen, tearing off a sheet of paper towel and sticking it beneath the faucet to wet it. He wiped the drying blood from beneath his nose. The droning alarm of technical difficulties was replaced with the sound of voices, and he returned to the living room to see if there was any explanation for what had just occurred.
There was only one anchorperson now, and she looked a little worse for wear, her blouse and normally perfectly coiffed hair disheveled. He had to wonder if the same thing that had happened to him, had happened there in the studio. In the back of his mind he remembered a story about a Japanese television broadcast of some cartoon show that had triggered seizures in many of those who had been watching.
Has something like that happened here? he wondered.
He caught the tail end of the anchor’s explanation about losing the signal from Angelina’s broadcast, but she then began to talk about breaking news: There was an emergency being reported at the Hermes Plaza, where the child had been delivering her message.
Mulvehill was riveted in place, standing in the center of the living room as a live shot filled the screen. It was an aerial view of the Plaza, the focus on the smoldering upper floor of the Hermes office building. Mulvehill gasped at the sight, his mind already trying to fill in all the gaps of what could possibly have happened. Through the smoke he could see the twisted wreckage of the rooftop, girders bent by some powerful force sticking up through the thick, billowing smoke. Mulvehill found himself moving closer to the television screen, trying to make out what was happening through the smoke. There was a sudden flash behind a billowing gray cloud and the rumble of what could have been an explosion. The picture suddenly went to hissing static, the signal from the helicopter’s camera failing.
But not before he saw something that turned his blood to ice.
Smoke was pouring out from many of the Hermes Building’s shattered windows, but there was also something else. At first glance it could have been mistaken as smoke, thick and black, but Mulvehill noticed that it hadn’t moved the way it should have. Just as the image had gone to static, Steven Mulvehill saw the strange blackness flow out from one of the windows, dripping down the front almost like wax from a melting candle.
It wasn’t natural, and he felt that familiar surge of panic come upon him as he remembered his experiences of late. He looked toward his living room windows at the sun shining outside his Somerville apartment, and he could have sworn that he heard screaming.
Mulvehill closed his eyes and saw the darkness running down from the skyscraper, slithering like a thing alive.
The disheveled anchor had returned, talking about what they believed was happening down in the Copley Square area, that the Hermes Plaza had been cordoned off by the fire department and police, and that they were still trying to determine whether this was an accident or something of a more malicious nature.
He had turned off the TV before he even realized that he was doing it. His hands were shaking, and he craved a drink like never before.
It would be so easy to put a stop to these feelings, he thought. A few quick gulps of whiskey would do the trick nicely. He already imagined the warm sensation in his belly as the booze took effect.
But it didn’t change the fact of what was happening at the Hermes Plaza.
He’d seen it on the television, and now, as much as he’d like to, he couldn’t un-see it.
What happened to me is now going to happen to others, he thought, imagining the darkness as it spread down Boylston Street, doing God knew what to whoever it encountered.
Mulvehill was terrified, but he had been terrified since his collision with the supernatural more than two weeks ago.
There was a moment of temptation where he almost picked up the phone to call his friend, to call Remy Chandler to ask him if he’d seen the news, but he managed to stop himself.
As far as he knew, this wasn’t about Remy. It was about him and the world he lived in, a once-secret world that from what he had just seen on the television was no longer hiding.
Hiding.
Mulvehill knew that this was what he had been doing: hiding himself away from the reality of it all, hoping that it wouldn’t come for him again.
He was still scared but he was also angry, which was a good thing, because he was finally feeling something more than overwhelming fear. Mulvehill embraced the anger, fueling it with the shame he felt over hiding away in his apartment.