Balance (The Divine, Book One) (27 page)

It
wasn’t enough to stop their initial attack. The three blades all came down
towards me at once, but the momentum had been broken, and I dropped and rolled
backwards just fast enough to avoid the strikes. Their swords clanged and
sparked against the rooftop. They turned towards me as one, ready for round
two. My own body was wracked with pain, and I didn’t know if I had the strength
to dodge another three-pronged attack. That was when I noticed the lines.

“What
have you done,” Boots cried, a growing spider web of poisoned black veins
climbing its way up her neck towards her face. She dropped her sword, her hand
no longer strong enough to hold it. The other two angels weren’t faring any
better, their own blades clattering to the ground as they fell to their knees.

In
that moment, I felt nothing but guilt. Good was struggling enough as it was,
and here I was destroying four of its warriors. I hadn’t wanted to, but what
choice did I have? Maybe I should have run and taken my chances that they would
have found me. It didn’t matter. It was too late to second guess.

Tears
fell from my eyes as the poison continued to spread and their skin turned
black. It was one thing to kill a demon, a creature that existed to create
chaos, fear, and pain. It was another to destroy an angel, a being that worked
to save lives, care for the sick, and empower the meek.

“I’m
sorry,” I said.

Boots
toppled to the ground in front of me. When her body fell to dust, I began to
cry in earnest.

I sat
on the rooftop for almost an hour, my body healing but my mind feeling as
though it would be forever scarred by the vision of the dying seraphs. This was
what I had agreed to do. It was what war was about. Raw, violent, and painful,
filled with impossible choices, and unwinnable situations. I should have never
gone to see Josette. I should have stayed with Rebecca, curled up on the bed
with her, keeping her company while she slept.

To
make it worse, I knew Josette hadn’t betrayed me as I had thought, and that
something had happened to her as a result. I didn’t know where she was, or if
she was okay. When this was over, if I lived, I would find her and tell her I
was sorry for doubting her.

Rebecca
and Obi were sitting on the couch together watching
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
when I returned. Rebecca was in the middle of explaining how people couldn’t be
turned into vampires by being bitten when I pushed open the door to the room
and stepped inside.

“Landon?”
Rebecca asked, her voice concerned. Obi turned off the television and got to
his feet.

“Are
you okay?” he asked.

I
shook my head and walked over to them, then dropped the three blessed swords I
had collected onto the coffee table. I didn’t care that they chipped the wood
and cracked the glass.

“What
happened?” Rebecca glided to her feet and came over to me, reaching out and
taking my hand in hers. She led me over to the sofa and eased me down onto it.

“I
went to find Josette,” I said. “Just to talk. I found someone else instead.” I
motioned towards the swords. “I didn’t want to kill them. They wouldn’t let me
walk away.”

“Touched?”
Rebecca asked. She used her other hand to rub my back. It wasn’t helping, but I
appreciated the gesture.

“Angels,”
I replied.

She
froze in shock. “Three of them?”

“Four,”
I said, then told them the entire story. They listened intently, though Obi
blanched when I described how the angels had died.

“There
was nothing you could have done, man,” Obi said. “They decided they wouldn’t
let you walk, they paid the price for it. I don’t like the idea of killing the
good guys either, but you’re a lot more important to mankind than they are.”

“The
servants of good are stubborn beyond reason.” Rebecca agreed. “How many do they
need to lose before they realize they can’t fight on their own?”

“At
least four,” I replied. I wasn’t looking to be cheered up, or have my actions
justified. All I wanted was to just get it off my chest. Their words didn’t
comfort me, but I did find myself growing angrier at the situation. I took a
deep breath and put it from my mind. Whatever feelings were being generated by
the experience, they had to wait. I turned to Rebecca.

“How
are you feeling?” I asked. She looked great, but I wanted to be sure.

“Ready
to go,” she said. “To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever felt better.”

I
couldn’t help but smile. She returned a demure smile of her own. “Obi?”

He
noticed the moment and stifled a laugh. “I got as much as I could.”

“Tell
me.”

Obi
got up and went over to his bag, flopping it open and pulling out a new stack
of printed papers. He moved the swords off the coffee table with surgical
delicacy and spread the papers out on the surface.

“It
was a bitch to get this thing printed,” he said of the architectural drawings
of the building Merov called home.

“Wait
a second,” Rebecca said, recognizing the layout. “What is it you’re planning?”
She took her hand from my back and moved to get a closer look at the prints.

“Your
father has a room that can only be opened by fingerprint. A very specific
fingerprint,” I said.

“It’s
his office,” she said. “The fingerprint belonged to Trevan Solen, my
grandfather. He built the room to prevent anyone from being able to enter,
including the Divine. The fingerprint only disables the electromagnetic lock on
the door. There are other defenses inside that require spoken passphrases to
shut down. Do you think that Merov knows where the Chalice is?”

“I’m
not sure. I know he’s enough of an influence that Reyzl showed up at his...
well, your party, and that he gave you an amulet. I’m pretty sure Reyzl knows
where the Chalice is, but I’m guessing that he’ll never give it up, and I’m not
too keen on going head to head with him again right now anyway. Oh, I never did
ask you, why was Reyzl at your party?”

It
didn’t seem possible that she could have become paler than she already was, but
Rebecca’s alabaster complexion turned almost all white.

“Merov’s
been trying for years to get in Reyzl’s good graces,” she said. “As a major
demon he has the power to lift him to archvampire, which would put him in
charge of all of the families in North America, provided he could defeat the
current archvampire in combat. The demon is... intrigued with me.”

“Intrigued
as in....”

She
didn’t want to say it, but after a long awkward pause, she did. “He wants to
dissect my brain, to understand why I am ‘so sentimental towards my food’, as
he puts it. Then he wants to see if he can reprogram me to be less sympathetic.
Then he wants to take me as his concubine. At least, that’s how Merov described
it. I doubt it would be as clinical as that.”

I
took a deep breath and swallowed the lump that had grown in my throat. For as
much as I had been hoping to avoid a direct confrontation with Reyzl,
everything I learned about him made it sound more and more inevitable. Would my
anger be enough to overpower him? In that moment, I was dying to find out.

“I
see,” I said, trying to be calm. “Another good reason to come over to my side.”

I
guess I could have been angry she had chosen me because she was stuck between a
rock and a hard place, but she had already proven too valuable to care too much
about the circumstances. The fact that I was developing a more-than-friends
kind of crush on her didn’t hurt either. It was all Obi’s fault for putting the
thought into my head.

“It
wasn’t like that,” Rebecca said, her eyes locking onto mine. “Landon, I didn’t
help you just to get away from Reyzl.” She wasn’t lying.

I put
my hand on her face and looked into her eyes. “I know,” I said. “Don’t worry
about it. I just can’t believe your own father would sell you out like that.”

She
reached up and put her hand over mine. “He is nosferatu; a minor demon, but
still a demon. There is nothing that comes ahead of gaining power and favor.
Family is either a bargaining chip, or a liability. Nothing more.”

“Cough
cough,” Obi said, interrupting our moment. “I hate to get in the middle of the
Princess Bride, but um... yeah?”

I
took my hand away and looked down at the prints. “I don’t suppose you know what
the passphrases are?” I asked Rebecca. Her laugh was enough of an answer. “Then
let’s just hope he didn’t design his traps to stop a diuscrucis. Obi, tell me
what I’m looking at.”

The
former marine pointed at the schematic. “Okay, the normal human entry points
are here.” The elevator. “Here.” A stairwell. “And here.” He pointed to another
area that looked like it should have been a solid wall. “That one, I had to dig
deep to find. I’m sure you know this Rebecca, but the building was constructed
by Alpha Industries, a huge contracting firm owned very indirectly by the Solen
family.”

“Your
human mob does a lot of garbage collecting,” she said. ‘Vampires tend to prefer
architecture.”

“It’s
a hidden escape route,” Obi continued. “An elevator shaft with a small
stairwell that wraps around it. I found one reference to it in the first draft
of the blueprints, which I had to hack into Alpha’s servers to get. Don’t ask
me how,” he said, cutting me off before I could. “Anyway, it doesn’t go to
ground level, it goes deeper. Much deeper; it’s below the sewer and subway
systems.”

“Where
does it lead?” I asked.

“I
don’t know,” Obi answered. “I was hoping your girlfriend could tell us.”
Rebecca and I both flushed. “Man, you guys are like a pair of grade schoolers.”

Rebecca
ignored his jab. “It most likely leads to an escape tunnel. It’s a standard
defense against demons.”

I was
confused. “Demons? Not angels?”

“Okay,
I can see you’re still missing a little from basic training,” she said. “Think
about how many demons there are, and how many angels there are.”

I had
no idea what the numbers looked like, but now that she mentioned it, demons did
seem to be a lot more prevalent.

“So
how does one defeat an enemy force that has ten to twenty times more
combatants?” she asked. “In the case of demons, most times you don’t have to.
If we didn’t spend so much time fighting amongst ourselves, we could have laid
waste to this world years ago. The angel’s favorite tactic is to turn demons on
each other.”

Pure
genius. It explained how the seraphim had managed to hold the tide as long as they
had, when as Josette had said few enough were willing to abandon Heaven for the
real Holy War.

“So
that’s our emergency exit too,” I said. “The tunnel will funnel any defenders
from being able to gang up on us. It should be a cakewalk for the three of us
to hold them back down there and make an organized retreat.”

“Agreed,”
Rebecca said.

Obi
didn’t look too comfortable with the idea, but he nodded. “What about going
in?” he asked.

“Tell
me if there’s any reason we shouldn’t just use the front door, “ I said.

There
were
the were
guards, but I was pretty confident I
could get us past them again. There was no way they would expect me to try to
go into the building a second time, so they’d never suspect anyone they
recognized.

“None
that I can think of,” Obi replied.

“Rebecca?”

“If
we’re discovered, it won’t matter much where we are - we’ll have to fight them
off either way. The front door is as good as anything else.”

“Okay,
then we’ll go in through the lobby. Play it straight, take the stairs.”

“The
stairs,” Obi said. “Man, that’s fifty stories.”

I
looked at him. “Weren’t you a Marine?”

“I’m
a former Marine. I haven’t done that kind of hike in two years.”

“I’ll
help you if you’re too weak to make it,” Rebecca said.

That
was just what Obi needed to hear.
 
“I’ve got it,” he
said.

I
turned to Rebecca. “Do you have any idea what kind of entourage your father
has? Or if he’ll be there?”

She
shrugged. “I have no idea. I’ve never lived in the apartment with him, and
before the party we hadn’t spoken in at least four months. Since he told me
about the deal he was trying to make with Reyzl.”

I
cringed at her mention of the deal, my anger bubbling back up. “Then I guess
we’ll see what’s what when we get there. Now, how do we handle the lock?”

Obi
picked up the prints of the apartment building and exchanged it for some
diagrams of the security system.

“It
may not be this one,” he said. “The records listed the manufacturer, not the
exact model, but I bet most of them are the same. It’s an electromagnetic
fingerprint lock, five thousand pounds of pressure, powered by the electricity
in the building when it’s working, a backup battery when it isn’t.” He looked
at me. “I was thinking maybe you could short out the power and disrupt the
battery somehow. Otherwise, we’ll need to remove the faceplate and wire it up
to a laptop to hack the software that runs it. I could do it, except I don’t
have tools or a laptop.”