"I should kill you for this," Remy snarled as he caught his breath in the shelter of the dark corridor. He could still hear the storm outside. Its rage was muffled by the shelter of their new surroundings, but it was still out there and still very angry.
"Perhaps you should," Sariel said, disregarding Remy's threat and heading down the corridor, past large glass windows that looked into empty office space. "Then again, you may want to wait and see why it is that I felt the need to resort to such desperate measures to bring you here."
Remy remained quiet, the anger inside him churning like the storm outside. He followed the Grigori to another flight of metal stairs and the two began to climb.
"What is this place?" he asked.
"Besides an abandoned oil rig in the middle of the South China Sea?" Sariel asked. "This is his home. Noah's home."
"He traded in his ark for an oil rig?" Remy said, still climbing and starting to wonder how many floors the structure had.
They reached what seemed to be the final level; the floor was lit in the sickly yellow of emergency lights, and shadow.
"Crammed on a ship with your entire family and almost every conceivable animal for an extended period of time can have a lasting effect," the Grigori said, before proceeding down the corridor.
Remy noticed that up here he could barely hear the storm. He doubted that it had subsided, and considered then that this level had been considerably soundproofed.
Sariel had reached the end of the dimly lit length of hall and now stood before a closed door. "In here," he said, not even bothering to knock as he opened it and walked inside.
Strains of classical music wafted out into the hall. It was Berlioz, his Symphonie Fantastique. It had been one of Madeline's favorite pieces. Remy flashed back to lazy summer mornings, windows open wide in their kitchen as they drank cup after cup of coffee while reading the Sunday Globe, the Symphonie Fantastique the morning's soundtrack.
Remy couldn't have been further from that moment.
"In here," he heard Sariel call out.
It was dark inside the room, except for a beam of light flashing on a screen that hung from the ceiling. A slide projector whirred at the opposite end of the room, its fan humming to cool its inner workings as the next slide in the carousel dropped into place.
Remy stood in darkness as the image of a bird appeared on the screen. There was nothing special about it; it was only a bird. That slide was then replaced by the image of a frog with beautiful blue skin.
Shielding his eyes from the harshness of the projector beam, Remy searched for Sariel and found him in the far corner of the room. He was standing beside the desk. The slide projector rested on it.
"Sariel?" Remy asked quietly, crossing the room toward him.
The room itself was in a shambles. Papers and books were scattered about as if the storm outside had touched down in the cramped confines of the office.
Sariel remained silent, unmoving, his gaze fixed to something on the floor behind the desk.
Another slide fell into place as Remy approached. Stacks of the plastic carousels littered the top of the desk, all of them loaded with slides. Remy peered over the clutter to find what he had expected.
Noah lay on the floor on his back, his ancient eyes swollen to slits, gazing up, unseeing, at the ceiling. The old man's face was badly bruised, as was his neck. Twin trails of blood from his damaged lips dried in the silver-gray hairs of his beard.
He didn't look much different than he had that day so long ago when Remy had watched him paint the mystic sigils on the ark. The only difference was that he was dressed in brown corduroy trousers and a heavy fisherman's sweater.
And he was dead.
It had been quite a few centuries since Remy had come face-to-face with the old man who had come to use the name Noah Driscoll. He'd read about him from time to time, about how he'd made his fortune as a shipping magnate before turning to oil. How the family business had been handed down through the generations, father to son. But in truth, it was Noah, assuming a new identity every few decades. God's touch had a tendency to considerably increase the life-span of a human, and for Noah, that had most certainly been the case.
"He was afraid that this might happen," Sariel said.
Another slide was projected onto the screen. Remy glanced in that direction to see a photo of some kind of worm, writhing in a patch of overturned earth.
"Maybe you should tell me what you know," Remy said, the words leaving his mouth before he had the opportunity to catch them. It was happening again, as it always did; he was inexorably pulled into the matters of the divine.
"Over the centuries he'd become obsessed," Sariel started to explain, his eyes still locked upon the battered corpse. "Fixated on the mission that God had given to him."
Another slide was projected onto the screen, and they both looked toward it—a bear in a tree, looking as though it had actually posed for the shot.
"They say he had millions of these," Sariel stated.
The bear was replaced by some kind of bright green insect.
"Photos of all the beasts that he was responsible for saving, as well as those that evolved from them."
A monkey with a strange, beaklike nose.
"But his obsession eventually took a turn down a truly disturbing path," the Grigori continued.
Remy looked away from a dolphin leaping happily in the ocean waves.
"Disturbing how?"
"He became obsessed with the things he was not able to save," Sariel explained. "The things that God had deemed unworthy; the things that were destined to die beneath the waters of the Great Flood."
Remy had never really understood why the Lord God had decided to wipe clean the slate and start again. It was almost as if He'd realized He'd made some sort of mistake, and had wanted it done away with before anyone could notice.
Whatever the reason, the Almighty had seen fit to destroy the planet, and use the beasts chosen to survive as the seeds of a second generation of life in the world.
"What kinds of things?" Remy asked, his curiosity piqued.
The slide carousel clicked past the image of a female tiger and her cubs, and the room suddenly brightened as the light of the projector reflected off of the whiteness of the screen. It continued to click away, though the remainder of the tray was empty.
"He called them his orphans," Sariel said with a sad laugh.
"Noah's orphans."
SIX
Sariel was about to continue when he suddenly turned toward the door. "We're not alone," he snarled, and before Remy could react, Sariel had traversed half the room with one powerful leap.
Shadows shifted in the doorway, someone fleeing now that they had been discovered.
Remy followed the Grigori in a run, catching a glimpse of the fallen angel as he darted around a corner in pursuit of his prey.
The rig was a maze of winding corridors, eventually coming to a stop at a set of swinging doors. Cautiously, Remy pushed one open.
Inside was a large storage space the size of a warehouse. Ordinarily it probably housed the supplies needed to keep a rig this size in working order, but now the space was nearly empty. A few crates and pallets of machine parts were stacked about the poorly lit room. But by the looks of them, they had sat there, unused, for quite some time.
Remy listened for a sign as to where Sariel had gone, but all he could hear was the wailing of the storm outside, eager to come in.