Balance (The Divine, Book One) (32 page)

“How
much further?” I asked her. I could hear more demons heading our way, the
shaking ground a cue that it wasn’t just more fodder. “We’re losing too much
time out here.”

Rebecca
didn’t seem to mind all the fighting. In fact she looked radiant in her
adrenaline stoked attack mode. The melting snow had caused her hair to stick to
her face in an alluring way, and her well-worn
henley
was clinging to the outline of her form.

“Agreed,”
she said. “We need to get inside.”

We
hurried the rest of the way to the Monastery, slowing only when the chasing
demons caught up to us. The trolls were the most difficult, their size allowing
them to outrun the fodder, but we were fortunate that there was no strategy to
their attack, and no cooperation. For all of their brute power, we were just
flat out superior.

The
Monastery entrance was a plain human-sized wooden door affixed to the center of
a long, high
stone wall
that comprised the south side
of the building. According to Rebecca’s inherited memory, it had been
constructed in the nineteen fifties to resemble a fourteenth century monastic
retreat, complete with a total absence of windows and no electricity, and
therefore lots and lots of candles. The idea was that this type of environment
would keep the monks focused on God and prayer because there was nothing else
to look at or do. What she hadn’t known was why the angels were using it, since
they tended to prefer wide, open spaces to small, dark containment; the precise
environment that most demons preferred.

The
door had already been torn apart, and it lay on the ground ten feet away.
Scattered around the entrance were the remains of a bloody and violent battle,
with a large number of half-decayed fodder and trolls littering the area along
with at least three or four angels. Since the Divine lost their physical
manifestations so soon after being destroyed, I was judging the outcome based
on how many blessed swords I found discarded.

“The
monks were Touched warriors,” Rebecca reminded me when I commented on my
system.

“Their
bodies would still be here,” I countered. I knew she was trying to help
alleviate my concern for Josette, and I appreciated it, but I was going to
worry until we found her.

“Not
if the demons took them off to consume them,” Rebecca said. I hadn’t thought
about that outcome, and it did give me a little bit of macabre peace. “We’ll be
safe from the outer demons once we’re inside. They would have entered already
if they hadn’t been
Commanded
not to.”

We
came across some of the monks on the other side of the door, in a small foyer
that had contained some kind of mechanism with seraph-scripted spikes. The
spikes were covered in blood, but the apparatus that had held them was smashed
to pieces, leaving them scattered among the casualties - three Touched monks
who had been assigned to work the trap, and a number of decayed fodder corpses.
A heavy stone door had lain on the other side of the room, but the intruders
had managed to obliterate it. Beyond the door, the hallway split in three
directions.

“Which
way?” I asked Rebecca.

The
inside of the building was almost silent. The scrape of claws and the
occasional echoed howl were the only indication that there was anything in here
at all. There was no sound of battle, no hint of angels fighting demons, and
that was bad. Were we too late? Had the battle already been lost?

“They
split off,” she replied. “They’re here to kill everything they find.”

Which
way then? I hated to split up, but we didn’t have a choice. “Okay, take the
left, I’ll go straight, and let’s hope the right corridor is a dud.”

“Landon,”
Rebecca said, reaching out and grabbing my arm. “We can’t. Even with the
transfer, I’m not powerful enough to take on a major demon on my own. I’m not
sure you are either.”

She
had a point. I had seen her do so much damage with so little effort I had
forgotten that there were demons out there that could eat us for breakfast.
“You’re right. We’ll go to the left.”

 The
corridor was dark, lit by candles that sat in plain iron sconces along the
walls. There was a small door every ten feet or so which led into simple eight
foot by eight foot rooms that reminded me of prison cells, outfitted with just
a small bed and a toilet. The doors had been torn off every single one of the
rooms we passed. Some were empty, but the others... the others were a gruesome
scene of blood splattered walls, decaying demons, and half-eaten corpses. When
we came upon demons that were still feeding, we destroyed them and moved on.

We
continued down the hallway. A rhythmic thumping sound began reverberating
through the walls. It was a steady pounding, every four or five seconds, a huge
THUMP that shook mortar from the stone construction. There was no other sound
now, wherever the demons were they no longer seemed to be on the move. We
hadn’t seen evidence of angels in any of the rooms, which was a good thing. We
didn’t know where they were though, and that was a bad thing.

“They
must have locked themselves in the chapel,” Rebecca said after considering the
banging. “We may be out of time.” I started running, and she followed.

My
pace was reckless, but in the moment I didn’t care. The balance of power was
already in Hell’s favor, and every angel that died gave them a stronger
foothold. I hadn’t helped the cause any earlier, and that drove me even harder
to want to ensure that no more seraphs were destroyed. We happened along a few
demon stragglers as we ran, and I tore through them without slowing, Rebecca
staying close behind.

The
split corridors seemed to reconnect at the back end of the Monastery, then turn
inward to the central part of the building. Following the layout brought us to
one more heavy doorframe that had lost its thick wooden door, and beyond it a
dining hall. It was here that the demons remained, pounding at a gigantic,
ornately decorated door that was covered top to bottom in seraphim writing.

 “Now
what?” I whispered to Rebecca.

We
had taken position outside the dining room, peeking in from the doorway. There
were at least a hundred demons gathered inside - a whole bunch of fodder, a
handful of weres, a couple of dog-like creatures I hadn’t seen before, four
female demons that Rebecca whispered were harpies, and the main power players,
seven fallen angels.

The
angels were the ones pounding the door, standing in a circle with their arms
held up and wings spread, a blue flame dancing in the center of a pentagram
they had scratched into the stone floor. The flame would grow and congeal, and
a ball of energy would launch out and slam against the barrier, rocking it back
and forth. A return flash of lightning-like defensive energy would lash into
the angels, burning and tearing at their bodies, which would heal before the
next attack and counterattack. Each of them was wearing an amulet around their
neck, negating the effectiveness of the angels’ last line of defense.

“Do
you see the angel closest to the door, the one with the short black hair?”
Rebecca asked.

I
looked to the figure she had described. Like the others, he was shirtless,
wearing only a pair of cloth pants cinched by a simple rope belt. His entire
upper body was covered in ragged tattooed sigils, and his wings had been dyed
black with red at the tips that made them look like they were dripping blood.

“That’s
Lazar,” she said. “He’ll be
Commanding
the fodder and
the hounds. If we can take him out we may be able to cause enough confusion to
disable the other angels before they can recover.”

“That’s
the plan?” I asked. “Why don’t I just tap dance in there naked? That would be
an easier distraction.”

Rebecca
bared her fangs in a twisted smile. “And a much more attractive one,” she
replied. “But I think the only demon that would be distracted is me.”

I was
able to be embarrassed despite our predicament. I could feel my face turn red.
The hallway shook as another blast of energy slammed into the doorway. I looked
over at it and noticed there was a small crack beginning to form in the upper
left corner. We were running out of time.

I
looked back at Rebecca, who was waiting for me to tell her what to do. Her face
was fearsome beauty, framed to perfection by the flickering candles behind her.
The flickering candles.

“Do
fallen angels hate fire as much as heavenly ones?” I asked.

“Hell
isn’t all fire and brimstone,” she said. “Of course they do.”

It
was the most ambitious demand I had ever made, and Dante’s words were in my
mind as I focused. “Bending the universe too much can have catastrophic
consequences,” he had written. I didn’t know if I had the power to do this, but
I was out of time and feeling desperate. I put my arm around Rebecca and
whispered into her ear. “Hold on tight, and don’t move.”

The
sound was something like a jet-propelled freight train; an oncoming wave of
destruction and power that shook the Monastery with such force that I feared it
might collapse. It started with a low rumble at the entrance to the structure,
but built momentum in no time as I pulled and pulled on the air and the heat,
bringing them to me in a gigantic combustible package.

The
demons heard it coming too, but they didn’t understand they were under attack,
and couldn’t understand how. They raised their heads to listen but stayed
gathered in the dining hall while the fallen angels continued their assault.

They
screamed in surprise when the flood of pure flame exploded into the room,
filling it in moments with searing heat. The summoned demons were immune, but
the weres were vaporized in an instant, and the angels cried out in pain and
dropped their own attack while their flesh burned and healed and burned again.

I
held Rebecca close to me in a bubble of air that I was holding the flood of
flame away from. “Wait here,” I told her. “You’ll die if you go out there.”

She
hadn’t realized what I planned to do, and her eyes shifted back to blue and
begged me not to do it. “Landon, you can’t survive. You won’t heal fast
enough,” she said.

“Maybe,
maybe not. If I do nothing I’m guaranteed to fail.” I kissed her on the cheek,
let go, and stepped out into the fire.

The
pain was intense. My skin started burning and my clothes combusted away to dust
in an instant. I pushed my body to heal faster, creating a constant battle of
burn and cleanse on my own flesh. My eyes were burning blind, so I had to rely
on my senses to see where my enemies were.

I
would hit Lazar first, and then the other angels. My hand had melted to the
handle of my sword, making it an almost cyborg-like extension. I broke into a
run, dashing through the flames, my mind a volatile mixture of pain, calm,
chaos, desperation, love, and anger.

I
demanded my eyes to heal as I approached the angels, opening them just in time
to see Lazar standing in front of me, his body flaming like a Burning Man, fear
registering on his face to see me coming at him. He had no time to move before
his head was severed clean from his body, the amulet slipping off his neck when
the carcass tumbled to the ground. I was standing right in front of the angels’
door now, and I spun around, took a deep breath, and dropped the firestorm, the
recession sucking all of the oxygen from the room.

My
face was a twisted wreck of pain and glory. I shattered Boot’s sword into six
deadly shards and sent them darting forward through the six angels’ crystal
amulets, through the six angels’ necks. The blood of the Grail lost, their
demon-turned bodies couldn’t recover from the damage of the blades.

I
slumped to the ground, the world around me turning fuzzy. I struggled to stay
awake, noticing a female shape moving towards me, vaguely understanding that it
wasn’t Rebecca, and that I should defend myself. How could I defend myself? I
had destroyed my sword. I had liked that sword too.

A
clawed hand raked across my cheek, sending me flopping to the floor. The harpy
jumped on me, her white fangs a stark contrast against ebony skin. She had a
knife in her other hand. I should get her off me. I should do something.

There
was an angry hiss, and then her head rolled forward and landed behind me, her
body kicked away before it could cover me in blood. Rebecca stood above me, her
expression worried despite her empty black eyes. I heard a growl, and then she
fell backwards, a huge mass of muscle pouncing on her.

Focus.
How could I focus? Everything was moving like mud. Like lightning. My eyes
wouldn’t stay straight. My head hurt. Rebecca needed me. I struggled to push
myself to a sitting position. Rebecca was wrestling with the hellhound, its
jaws snapping at her face, her arms at full extension to hold it back. More
demons were coming, more of the harpies, and another hound. I knew there was
another hound.

The
angels’ massive door began to open, sending a spreading ray of light into the
room. I was still lying right in front of it, and it was so bright on the other
side. In the doorway was a silhouette. An angel. Its eyes met mine. I knew this
one. Josette.

She
launched from the doorway like a rocket, her sword coming down on the hound
lunging towards me. I hadn’t seen it, would never have been able to stop it.
Another angel came out of the door, then another. They assaulted the remaining
demons. Josette was at my side.