He couldn’t stand the thought. To have already lost his wife and now to be losing his best friend was more than the angel could bear, and he felt his psyche begin to crumble. The dog moaned, and Remy reached down to pull the broken animal into his arms. He could feel Marlowe’s life force waning. He bowed his head, placing his brow against the dog’s cheek. He wanted to feel everything he could before it was gone.
Marlowe was suddenly awake again, fighting to hold on to what life he still had.
“Why?”
he asked.
“Why you not here?”
Remy wanted to explain, but the words would not come, for he was ashamed. He should have been there. He should have been with the ones he loved most at a time like this. All he could do was silently look into the poor animal’s eyes as Marlowe’s life force gradually ebbed way.
“Stay with me,”
he commanded his friend, his emotion gradually turning to fury.
“Did you hear me, beast? I told you to stay!”
But the last of Marlowe’s life energies dwindled like the smoke from an extinguished candle. And just as they were about to be gone altogether, the Seraphim called out for help.
That was when they came, rising up out of the shadows of the basement; the Nomads had been listening.
Remy knew them at once.
“Is it true?”
one asked as he stepped forward, his voice filled with wonder.
Remy could feel himself slipping, the divine fire at his core raging to be set free. He wasn’t sure of the question, but . . .
“Yes,”
he replied anyway, the weight of his response crippling.
The Nomads looked up from the shattered basement, up through the floor, to the levels above.
“It is true,”
the leader said.
“It is true,”
repeated the others as one.
The leader stepped closer and placed a hand on Remy’s shoulder.
“You said that you would do anything.”
The spark of Marlowe’s life was nearly extinguished, and Remy did not have the strength to live without him.
“I would,”
he agreed, pulling the dog closer, hoping that would somehow give Marlowe a bit more time—a bit more life.
“We can save him, and you.”
The leader’s touch was cold, a numbness radiating from his hand down Remy’s shoulder, into his chest.
“I don’t want to be saved.”
Remy buried his face in the black fur of his dog.
“Yes,”
the Nomad leader agreed.
“But we do. . . . We will be part of the ending and this new beginning.”
Remy looked up at the hooded angel standing beside him. The leader’s face was pale, the darkness around it filled with twinkling stars so beautiful, and yet so very cold.
“I don’t understand.”
The Nomad smiled.
“You will,”
he said.
“But first you must tell us yes, that you truly do want our help. . . .”
“Yes,”
Remy said before the leader was even finished.
“Yes.”
“And second, you must prepare.”
Remy held his dog tighter, willing the animal to hang on for just a moment longer.
“Prepare?”
he asked.
“You must be ready,”
the Nomad leader answered, slowly nodding his hooded head.
“For there will be sacrifice.”
• • •
The memories that followed were a bombardment to his senses, a deluge of moments that made him cry out.
Remy saw what he had done—the deal he had made in exchange for . . .
The caul of shadow that had covered his head was freezing to the touch, blistering the flesh of his fingertips as he tore the icy membrane from his face. But it still wasn’t enough. It took all that he had not to rip out his own eyes, to stop the flow of imagery. The memories.
How could I have been so cruel? So damnably selfish?
Each recollection was like the thrust of a knife, the guilt he was feeling worse than anything the Nomads had done to him.
Remy saw what he had sacrificed, the golden wings cut away from his back with a dagger forged from a darkness that had existed before the Almighty’s blinding light. He did not cry out as they hacked at the flesh, bone, and feathers, collecting the blood that spilled from the wounds.
They would use the blood to mark him as they were marked, the sigils providing him with the means to control the growing madness of the Seraphim before its fire could consume him.
And when the transformation was complete, when the fire had been suppressed, a cold darkness filled him. He was one of them, but he was also something more.
Remy begged for the visions to stop, but they rushed in to fill the empty places in his memory as if desperate to be known—to be recalled.
The Nomads had taken Marlowe and placed him within a crystalline coffin. Remy remembered breaking into that crystal case.
“I’m going to save you,”
he told his best friend, but the dog begged him not to, as if he sensed the change in Remy.
Please let me die.
And Remy told him,
“No.”
The angel knelt upon the ground and cried, remembering what he had done to his beloved dog. “I’m so sorry,” he sobbed, recalling it all in every loathsome detail, not strong enough to hold back the memory.
Marlowe’s body had been severely injured, but his life force—his soul—was still strong. The Nomads had called forth a Hellion—a survivor of the most twisted Hellscapes—and its powerful body would house the soul of Remy’s most loyal friend.
And even though his best friend had begged him not to, Remy helped the Nomads transfer Marlowe’s soul from the dog’s broken body into the body of the hellhound.
Marlowe’s soul had fought, struggling to escape the dark magicks that were attempting to contain it. Remy tried to reassure it, telling the animal’s soul that everything would be all right.
In retrospect, even then, he knew it was a lie.
For the Hellion had an essence of its own and refused to be usurped by this other soul. The two life energies battled within the confines of the Hellbeast’s body before both succumbed, becoming something else that was equal parts Marlowe and Hellion.
A Unification of another kind.
It wasn’t what Remy had planned for his friend, but it was what he had to live with.
What they both had to live with.
“What did I do?”
Remy remembered the tormented question as his dog had awakened transformed by the magick of the Nomads.
“You should have let me go,”
the dog had growled from the body of a monster.
“You should have let me die.”
Remy could hear the hurt, feel the misery as it exuded from his best friend, but it didn’t change the simple fact of the matter.
“I couldn’t lose you, too.”
It was the look in the dog’s blazing eyes then that finally made Remy realize the depth of his error. It was a look that said he
had
lost his best friend.
And a little more of Remy Chandler had died.
• • •
Remy surged up from these newly awakened memories feeling as filthy and wretched as the world he now inhabited, but there was little opportunity for him to wallow in self-loathing, for they were under attack.
Remy jumped to his feet and suddenly realized that he had been moved. “Where?” he began, looking around at the darkened city streets. “How did I get here?”
Azza was looking in the direction of the sounds of a skirmish. The children of Samson were already heading to confront the threat.
“You’ve been out for a bit,” the Nomad leader said as he motioned for the other Nomads to go and help the others.
“How long?”
“Does it matter now?”
Remy felt a flash of anger, but he let it go and instead began to follow the Nomads.
“No,” Azza said, grabbing his arm. “That battle isn’t for you. You’re to go that way.” He let go of Remy’s arm and pointed toward a street shrouded in darkness.
“But the Filthies . . . ,” Remy began.
The Nomad leader shook his head. “You must go that way . . . to the door.”
Instinctively, Remy reached into his pants pocket and found the metal key. It was warm, far warmer than it should have been.
“Go,” Azza commanded. Then he abruptly turned and walked away in the direction of the battle.
“This door,” Remy called after him.
Azza turned.
“What will I find behind it?”
“The answers you seek. The solution to the problem . . . to the end and the beginning.”
• • •
A part of Remy wanted to chase the Nomad into battle, to join with his friends in the defeat of the Filthies that had tracked them from their encampment.
He wasn’t sure he could stand any more knowledge.
But there was a pull upon the key. He could feel the tug on the tarnished metal, leading him into the shadows of the city block behind him.
Remy allowed himself to be drawn down the street, over the busted concrete, past the shattered windows of storefronts and the bizarre and twisted architecture of Heaven and Hell melded together. It was like a fever dream become reality.
The drag upon the key continued, until Remy found himself standing before a partially collapsed building, the structure leaning precariously to one side, the top floor having collapsed inward. Its front door sat crooked in its frame, three steps up. The pull on the key increased, and Remy took it from his pocket. Carefully, he climbed the broken steps and inserted the key in the lock.
There was a white flash: a simple, static shock? Perhaps. Or maybe something more.
Remy pushed open the door and stepped inside, closing the door behind him. Instead of the lobby of the nearly collapsed brownstone, he found himself staring down the length of a long stone corridor, at the end of which was a heavy wooden door.
He knew this place. The name was on the tip of his tongue.
As he drew closer, he saw the broken neon sign, hanging askew over the door.
M TH S AH’S
Methuselah’s. He had found Methuselah’s.
And then the heavy wooden door at the end of the stone corridor slowly creaked open, urging him to come forward.
Urging him to enter.
F
rancis loved Roy Orbison.
The former Guardian angel sat in Leona’s front seat, eyes closed, humming along to the tune of “Only the Lonely.”
He’d been sitting there with the car running for close to an hour, waiting for everything to die before trying to put the genie back in the bottle.
Or God’s wrath back in its canister.
The fallen angel opened his eyes and glanced out the window. The Broker lay just outside the passenger door on his back, eyes wide with the realization of the terror that he had caused.
Francis opened the car door and stepped out. He looked down at the demon and felt something that could only have been a twinge of guilt. “Look at what you made me do,” he hissed, kicking the demon’s corpse. “We couldn’t have played nice? No, that would have been too fucking easy.”
He imagined all those that lived in the Bone Master encampment, the young training to be the clan’s latest assassins. They were all dead now, dying horribly because their spokesperson wouldn’t bend the rules.
“Was it worth it?” he asked the corpse at his feet. He gazed away from the body of the Broker, looking out over the compound, listening to the eerie silence of what the Wrath had wrought. Through a heavy, blue-tinged mist he could see the bodies of those who’d tried to escape their fate, struck down by the anger of God. A by-product of the Wrath, the mist swirled about the air, even though the air was deathly still. It was looking for more life, desperate to do more of what it was created to do.
But all good things must come to an end, even for the Wrath of God.
Francis walked over to the canister that had held the Wrath and picked it up. Gazing into the darkness of the container, he prepared himself for what he knew wouldn’t be easy.
Inside the pocket of his suit jacket he found the wrinkled piece of paper where he’d written down the invocation that would call the Wrath back to its vessel. He studied the writing for a moment.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” he muttered, clearing his throat before calling out to God’s anger in the language created specifically to control it.
Francis continued to read the words, watching as the bluish gray fog grew thicker, whirling around him as if angry. He held out the open vessel as he reached the halfway point of the invocation. The fog flowed toward the opening, then veered off defiantly.
Great,
he thought, speaking the words louder and more forcefully.
It was like watching a bass at the end of a hook fighting not to be pulled into the boat. Francis continued to read, remembering the guy he had gotten the canister from stressing how important it was to read the spell to draw the Wrath back with the utmost confidence, explaining that the death force was like an unruly dog, easily sensing weakness and challenging the one who sought to bind it.
For a brief moment he wished that he had a newspaper to whack it on the snout. Instead, he kept reading, sterner, harder—he’d show this plague of anger who was boss. The Wrath continued to fight him.
And just when he thought that he had it contained, it deviated away from the opening, what had already gone inside spilling out and flowing down to the street level. Francis watched with interest as the Wrath flowed into the dead Broker’s body, entering through the demon’s every orifice.
Great,
Francis thought.
How the fuck do I get it out of there?
He didn’t have time for this shit.
He moved closer to the corpse. It had become swollen now, filled up with the Wrath of God.
“I know you’re in there,” Francis said to it. “Why don’t we make this easy and you come out and get back into your canister?”
He prodded the corpse with the toe of his shoe.
The demon’s body gurgled grotesquely and seemed to expand, almost as if the Broker were still alive and breathing.
And then the corpse began to move.
“That’s different,” Francis said, stepping back from the corpse, which had started to flop around on the ground like a fish tossed up onto a dock.
The Broker’s mouth started to move, and an awful croak flowed out from its recesses.
“Un . . . under . . . understand?” the Wrath of God strained to ask.
“Do I understand you? Yes, yes, I do,” Francis said. “What I don’t understand is what the fuck you’re doing.” He held out the vessel. “Quit fooling around and get back in here.”
“Things . . . ch . . . changing,” the Wrath stammered.
“Yeah, the times they are a-changing, I get it. Back in the can.”
“No! The . . . the great forgiveness is . . . is about . . . is going to occur . . . Unification . . .”
Francis recalled what he had heard at Methuselah’s but had never bought that it would ever occur. However, if anybody—or thing—would know of such things, it would be something that still held a connection to the Creator.
“Seriously?” Francis asked. “God is going to forgive . . .”
“Everything . . . changes,” the force of rage stated. “Peace . . . and love . . . in . . . in the cosmos . . . No hate . . . no rage . . .”
“No Wrath,” Francis added. “So you’re afraid that if you go back in the container, you’ll never get out again.”
“Confined for eternity . . . never being free . . . again.”
The Wrath was getting better with communicating, getting a handle on manipulating the vocal cords of the demon corpse. Francis didn’t like that, not wanting it to get too damn comfortable, so comfortable that it might not want to leave.
“Y’know what, I just don’t buy it,” Francis said. “Sure, the Morningstar is welcomed back to Heaven with open arms, but I can’t imagine that there isn’t something out there that just wants to piss in the great cosmic punch bowl. There’s an awful lot of darkness in the cosmos, and I’m sure there are things hiding in it that don’t like the idea of everything being all sunny, warm, and cuddly.”
The corpse looked at him with huge hopeful eyes, the blue mist leaking out from its tear ducts to float in the air about its head like a thought bubble.
“Seriously, I can’t think of a time when something like you wouldn’t be needed . . . or somebody like me, for that matter.”
Francis thought about a universe where he wouldn’t be required to kill and imagined that it would be pretty damn boring.
“No, I think we’re good even if this Unification business ends up happening.”
The corpse of the Broker studied his features, perhaps searching for a hint of dishonesty, or maybe it was just looking a little more deeply at the one who had set it free.
“We are . . . alike,” the Wrath told him.
Francis didn’t like to hear it, but he knew that what the anger entity was saying wasn’t too far off.
“Yeah, we are at that,” he said.
The Wrath went quiet then and seemed to be thinking about its next move. Francis decided that it might be worth a try to see if he could get the Wrath to do what he wanted.
“So what do you say?” Francis asked it. “One force of death and destruction to another. Will you get back inside your canister?”
Again the corpse stared, but then it opened its mouth all the wider and the thick mist began to flow outward. Francis didn’t even have to continue with the spell of invocation; the Wrath went back inside its container willingly, trusting him that it would be called upon again. Placing the lid upon the vessel and making sure that it was sealed, Francis had no doubt that it would be.
He hadn’t been lying to the Wrath when he said that he couldn’t imagine a universe where death and destruction weren’t as much a part as life and creation.
Placing the canister beneath his arm, he took one good last look around, then climbed into Leona, telling the car that it was time to go home.
The car responded sluggishly, sated and drowsy from all that it had eaten. He’d promised her, as well as her owner, that she would eat well, and he’d most certainly done his part. Leona turned control over to him, and he put her in drive. Hitting the gas, he drove through the open courtyard area of the compound, paying little attention as he rolled over the bodies of those stricken by the Wrath.
“Anytime you’re ready, girl,” he told the car, massaging her dashboard.
Her engine purred loudly as she worked her magick, tearing through dimensional barriers like spiderwebs and ending up back home where they’d started. She pulled into the driveway and into the large garage, its doors open wide, welcoming her back.
Francis was gathering up his belongings when his cell phone rang. Fearing that it had something to do with Remy, he answered without checking the caller ID, feeling cold fingers of dread in his chest when he realized who was on the other end of the line.
“What can I do for you?” he asked. “Yes, your information was most certainly correct. Thank you.”
He listened to the silky voice as it told him there was something to do.
“I’ll be right there,” Francis said, instantly forgetting everything else.
Having no choice but to obey.
• • •
These days Steven Mulvehill felt as though he was trapped in some bizarre kind of nightmare, only it was real, and no matter how many times he pinched himself there was no waking up.
He came down the stairs with his gun in hand, finger on the trigger. He felt it almost immediately upon reaching the fourth step from the bottom, almost a complete change in atmosphere.
He remembered the old days, when just being a cop was enough to create the kind of stress that kept him awake for far too many hours. Some therapy had actually helped him with those anxieties.
But that was before Remy Chandler had entered his life. Now all bets were off and the nightmares were actually walking the streets, and sometimes they were even waiting for him when he got home from work. Yeah, thanks a bunch, Remy Chandler.
The air downstairs had become deathly still, stagnant. He saw Squire in the doorway to the kitchen. The goblin was just standing there, staring ahead at something that Mulvehill could not yet see.
“Squire,” he called out. “What’s the story?”
“Get over here,” Squire ordered, not moving.
Mulvehill braced himself.
So much had changed since Remy had first revealed his true nature. The angel of Heaven had pulled back the curtain and shown him what things were really like. Mulvehill guessed he should have felt special, but instead, he was just terrified. And the terror had become part of the new normal.
He saddled up alongside Squire, his gun ready, and what he saw chilled him to the core.
One of those killers, demons, whatever the fuck they were, stood in the kitchen, perfectly still, like a statue.
“What’s it doing?” Mulvehill asked, his voice rife with tension.
“I don’t know,” the goblin replied. “It’s been like that since I found it.”
They stood there watching, feeling their tensions increasing—a balloon of anxiety slowly inflating, growing larger and larger until . . .
“Well, we just can’t stand here staring at it,” Mulvehill hissed, moving past Squire and into the kitchen.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Squire cried.
“What does it look like? It’s waiting for something.”
He felt like he was moving across a minefield as he slowly grew closer, stopping a mere six feet away.
The demon continued to stand there, its dark gaze staring ahead. Mulvehill wasn’t exactly sure what it could see, but he made a show of putting his gun away, then lifted both hands to show that they were empty.
“What do you want?” he asked, even though he knew exactly what the killer was looking for, and it was upstairs in a coma.
The demon assassin’s head turned ever so slightly to look at him. “Finally, someone who understands the etiquette of the parley.” The demon’s hands appeared from beneath its robes, causing Mulvehill to jump back and reach for his gun.
But the demon showed that his hands were empty as well, and then chuckled. “Simply a talk to understand the situation.”
“A talk,” Mulvehill repeated. He glanced back at Squire, who was tightly gripping his axe. “A talk,” he said again to the goblin, motioning for him to lower his weapon. Begrudgingly, the goblin did what was asked of him.
“Talk, then,” Mulvehill ordered the demon.
It bowed its bald head and began to speak. “A contract is still open. The quarry is in this dwelling. A contract is
always
fulfilled.”
It was no surprise to Mulvehill why the assassin was there, and he remained silent.
“You,” the demon pointed a long finger first at Mulvehill, then at Squire. “And you . . .” His eyes went to the ceiling, as if he could see through the ceiling to the rooms above. “And any others who are with the quarry . . .”
The demon’s eyes dropped down again to fix upon Mulvehill. “You are not our targets,” the assassin said, slowly shaking his head, “but you obstruct our actions.”
Mulvehill remained silent.
“All of you may leave this dwelling safely and let us complete our contract.”
Us—
the word struck Mulvehill. His eyes darted to the windows in the kitchen, catching traces of moving shadow that told him the assassin in the kitchen wasn’t the only one who had dropped by.
“Let us complete the contract, and our dealings will be done.”
The Bone Master fell silent then, his spidery hands once again disappearing beneath his robes.
“Are you finished?” Mulvehill asked. “Is it my turn to . . . parley?”
The demon smiled, bowing his head again.
Mulvehill stepped closer, never breaking eye contact with the demonic killer. “You can’t have him, and we will do anything to keep him with us.”
They continued to stare at each other, until finally the demon spoke. “Are you finished?” he asked.
“I am.”
“Very brave,” the assassin complimented. “But very stupid.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before,” Mulvehill said.
The tension inside the kitchen continued to expand, that balloon of anxiety so big now that it was only a matter of seconds before it burst.
“We are done here,” the demon stated.
“We are,” Mulvehill agreed.
The balloon grew bigger . . .