“Please, help me,” he thought in that arcane tongue. “If it is in your power, please don’t let my friend die.”
At first he didn’t think his pleas had any effect—but then he saw that a chimpanzee had turned and was slowly returning with a comical gait.
“It’s coming back,” Aaron said to Zeke, not in English, but in the old tongue.
“Open yourself to it,” he responded in kind. “Take it into yourself. Accept it as part of you.”
Aaron shook his head violently, eyes still clamped shut. “What does that mean?” he asked.
The old man dug his nails painfully into his shoulders. “Accept it, or you both die.”
A jungle cat was almost upon him, and Aaron gazed into the fearsome beast’s eyes.
“I accept you,” he thought in the ancient speak, unsure of what he should be saying, and the panther lifted its head to become a serpent, but this was unlike any snake he had ever seen before. It had tufts of silky fine hair flowing from parts of its tubular body, and small muscular limbs that clawed at the air as if in anticipation. And the strangest and most disturbing thing of all, it had a face—something not usually associated with the look of a reptile. This serpent wore an expression on its unusual facial features, one of contentment, and spread its malformed arms, beckoning in a gesture that suggested Aaron, too, had been accepted.
The ophidian beast began to glow eerily, and Aaron could discern a fine webwork of veins and capillaries running throughout the creature’s body. The light of the snake became blinding and the solid black behind his eyes was burned away like night with the approach of dawn.
A painful surge of energy that felt like thousands of volts of electricity suddenly coursed through Aaron’s body. He opened his eyes and looked down on his dog. He knew that Gabriel’s life was almost at an end.
“It’s time, Aaron,” he heard Zeke say.
Aaron looked at him. For some reason the old man was crying. Aaron’s hands tingled painfully and he gazed down at them. A white crackling energy, like eruptions of arc lightning, danced from one fingertip to the next.
“What’s happening to me?” he asked breathlessly.
“You’re whole now, Aaron. You’re complete.”
Instinctively Aaron knew what had to be done. Gazing at his hands, he turned them palms down and again placed them upon Gabriel. He felt the energy leave his body, leaping from his fingers to the dog, burrowing beneath fur and flesh. And the air around them was filled with the charged scent of ozone.
Gabriel’s body twitched and thrashed, but Aaron did not take his hands away. The blood that spattered the dog’s fur started to dry, to smolder, evaporating into oily wisps that snaked into the air.
“I think you’ve done all you can,” Zeke said quietly nearby.
Aaron pulled his hands away from the animal. For a brief moment his handprints glowed white upon the dog’s fur—and then were gone. The powerful sensation throughout his body was fading, but he still felt different, both mentally and physically.
“What did I do?” he asked, looking from Zeke to the dog.
Gabriel was breathing slow regular breaths, as if he were merely taking a little snooze.
“What needed to be done if Gabriel—and you—are to survive,” Zeke answered ominously.
Aaron reached out and touched the dog’s head. “Gabriel?” he said softly, not sure if he believed what he was seeing.
Gabriel languidly lifted his head from the street, yawned, and fixed Aaron in his gaze. “Hello, Aaron,” he said as he rolled onto his belly.
Aaron could feel his eyes well up with emotion. He leaned forward and hugged the dog. “Are you all right?” he asked, squeezing the animal’s neck and planting a kiss on the side of his muzzle.
“I’m fine, Aaron,” Gabriel answered. The dog seemed distracted, pulling away from his embrace.
“What’s the matter?” Aaron asked the dog as he looked around.
“Have you seen my ball?” Gabriel asked in a voice filled with surprising intelligence.
And Aaron came to the frightening realization that he may not have been the only one to change.
Too late, the angel Camael thought, perched like a gargoyle at the edge of the building. He sadly gazed down at a restaurant consumed in flames. Too late to save another.
Thick gray smoke billowed from the broken front windows of Eddy’s Breakfast and Lunch; tongues of orange flame, like things alive, reached out from the heart of the conflagration, hoping to ensnare something, anything to fuel its ravenous hunger.
From his roost across the street, Camael watched as firefighters aimed their hoses and tried to suffocate the inferno with water before it had a chance to spread to neighboring structures. They would need to be persistent, the angel thought, for it was a most unnatural fire they battled this morn.
He had planned to make contact with the girl this very morning, to guide her through the change her body was undergoing, and warn her of the dangers it presented—dangers that came far sooner than even he had imagined.
Camael had been watching the girl— What was her name? Susan.
He had been observing Susan since he first caught scent of her imminent transformation. It was so much harder to track them these days; the world was a much larger and more complex place than it had been in the beginning. The enemy used trackers, human hounds, but he could not bear to use the oft-pathetic creatures in that way. Camael found it far too cruel.
Susan was a loner, as was often the nature of the breed, living alone without close friends or family. But she did have a job as a waitress, a job that seemed to be the center of her reality. That was where she came alive: surrounded by the chattering masses of the popular eating establishment. She would serve them, converse with them, and send them on their way back into the world with a kind word and a wave. At Eddy’s she was accepted, loved even; but outside its doors was a cold, harsh, unfriendly place.
Camael had watched and waited for the signs of change in her. He had even started to frequent the restaurant just so that he might observe her more closely. He didn’t have long to wait. Her appearance became disheveled, dark circles forming beneath her eyes, an obvious sign that she was not sleeping. The dreams were usually first, the collective memories of an entire race from thousands of years attempting to assert themselves. That alone was enough to drive some of them mad, never mind the changes that were still to come.
The firefighters below seemed to have the blaze under control and were entering the building, most likely to retrieve the bodies of those who had been trapped within.
Camael sighed heavily. At this early hour Eddy’s would have been crowded with customers—those coming off the late shift and those just beginning their workday. Verchiel certainly outdid himself this time, the angel thought as the first of the victims was carried from the smoldering building.
The girl must have been much further along than Camael had realized if they were able to find her with such ease. If only he had acted earlier this might have been avoided. He might have been able to convince the young woman to run before the Powers had a chance to lock on to her scent.
He would need to move faster with the next.
The firefighters were laying the smoking bodies down behind a hastily constructed screen on the sidewalk in front of the burnt-out shell that had once been Eddy’s. Camael counted sixteen so far. The girl’s had yet to be recovered.
There was a ferocity to the Powers’ latest attacks, a complete lack of concern for innocent lives, a certain desperation to their actions. He thought of Samchia’s murder in Hong Kong. There had always been killing, it was what the Powers did—it was their reason for existence. But of late…Why this sudden escalation of violence? It disturbed him. What had stirred the hornet’s nest, so to speak?