“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 lifespan 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
S
ariel 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.
“Remy,”
a voice suddenly whispered from somewhere in the shadows.
His heart fluttered as he looked around. He knew that voice, and had to wonder if he’d somehow slipped into another of the bizarre, dreamlike states he’d experienced while at the house in Maine.
He blinked his eyes and shook his head. Had the chamber become darker? A damp chill seemed to be emanating from the encroaching shadows.
“Remy, I have something to show you,”
said the voice of his wife, and he found that he couldn’t move, standing perfectly still, waiting for her to come to him.
And she did, slowly emerging from the sea of black, still wearing her flowing summer dress. She smiled as she reached for him.
Remy closed his eyes and did the unthinkable. He wished the vision of her away.
Madeline’s hand was deathly cold as it snaked into his, and he started at her chilling touch. Opening his eyes, he stared into hers, feeling himself drawn into their depths.
But there was something wrong. How many times had he looked into Madeline’s eyes, lost in the love that he found there? These were not those eyes, and Remy fought to be free of them.
As much as it pained him, he spoke the words as he tried to pull his hand from hers. “You’re not her.”
But the woman that appeared as his wife held fast, refusing to let him go.
“No,”
she said plaintively.
“Please, don’t pull away. I have something to show you.”
The desperate look on her familiar features rendered him powerless and he allowed her to pull his hand closer.
“A gift of our union,”
she said, and placed his hand upon the warmth of her stomach.
Remy stumbled back with a gasp, dispelling the eerily real vision. The palm of his hand tingled strangely, and he flexed his fingers.
“A gift of our union,”
he heard the vision’s voice say again.
But the mystery of the words was quickly dispelled by a blood-curdling cry that echoed through the storage space.
“Sariel?” Remy called out, running in the direction of the scream.
As he grew closer, he could hear the unmistakable sounds of a struggle, and the Grigori leader’s voice raised in anger. He came around a pallet, stacked high with wooden boxes, to see that Sariel had caught his prey, and had driven him to the ground. The man struggled weakly as Sariel’s fists rained down on his face.
“What are you doing?” Remy yelled.
Sariel raised his fist to bring it down again upon the man’s swollen and bloody features, but Remy caught his wrist. The Grigori’s head spun toward him, insane fury burning in his cold gray eyes.
“Enough,” Remy commanded.
Sariel tried to pull free of his grasp, but Remy held fast, pulling the Grigori off of his victim.
The mysterious man moaned, bubbles of blood forming upon his lips.
“Who is he?” Remy asked, letting go of Sariel’s wrist and kneeling beside the man.
“The one responsible for killing Noah, I would assume,” the fallen angel answered with a snarl. He was rubbing his wrist where Remy had gripped it.
“Could he be one of Noah’s employees?” Remy asked, patting the man down, looking for some form of identification.
“As far as I know, Noah had no employees,” Sariel answered. “The old man enjoyed his isolation. He shut this rig down years ago.”
“Who are you?” Remy asked the man, gently slapping his cheek to rouse him, but Sariel had done an exceptional job in beating him unconscious.
Some of the man’s blood got on Remy’s hand and he felt the divine power of the Seraphim, locked away deep inside him, stir with familiarity.
“He’s one of us,” Remy stated, wiping the blood on the leg of his pants. “He’s an angel.” He turned to look up at Sariel.
But the Grigori wasn’t paying any attention. He was instead staring into the shadows around them.
“What’s wrong?” Remy asked.
Sariel raised a hand to silence him, head tilted. Listening.
At first, all Remy could hear was the raging storm outside the rig, but then he, too, heard the sounds.
Something rustling in the shadows.
Sariel immediately stiffened.
“We need to go,” he said, his hands already moving through the air as he began to weave a magickal passage, a means for them to escape.
Remy stood, attempting to see what was there in the darkness, half expecting his dead wife to step from the shadows.
“What is it?” he asked, as what little light they had within the warehouse space was suddenly extinguished.
Sariel didn’t answer, continuing to focus on conjuring the magicks to take them away.
Remy was about to demand an answer when the passage began to open, a swirling vortex even blacker than the darkness that surrounded them.
Sariel bent down, hauled the unconscious angel up, and dove through the doorway to safety.
Remy paused. His curiosity got the better of him. He allowed the divine power within him to emerge, channeling the angel fire just enough to illuminate his hand and dispel the encompassing gloom.
Something squealed as if in pain, fleeing into a pool of shadows.
It appeared almost human.
Almost.
SEVEN
R
emy exited the magickal passage into the safety of an ornate ballroom. He knew this place, the grand room where Sariel and his Grigori held their countless parties. From the outside, the building located in the area of downtown Boston known lovingly as the Combat Zone appeared abandoned, run-down and decrepit. But in actuality, it hid one of the more opulent nests that the Grigori had scattered around the world.
“What the hell was that?” he asked, stepping back from the gradually diminishing supernatural doorway, eyeing the bubbling darkness in case whatever it was he had seen on the other side decided to follow.
“Your true nature is showing,” Sariel spoke.
At first Remy had no idea what the fallen angel was talking about, but then remembered his hand. Its golden flesh still burned with the power of the Seraphim.
Clenching his fist, he pulled the fire back. It didn’t want to go, but Remy was persistent, and the divine power finally bent to his will. It was becoming harder to suppress his true nature since the near Apocalypse, but as of now, he was still its master.