The Fallen 3 (15 page)

Occasionally, when a young Nephilim’s power ran out of control, when the angelic influence overwhelmed the human conscience, and the Nephilim became a danger, it had been necessary to kill the Nephilim. It was always a last resort, and none of them ever talked about such things.

Although they all knew it happened.

“You know we wouldn’t do that unless …”

“Unless I was out of control,” Jeremy said. “Like how I was in the mines today … like when I cut the ear from a dead troll’s head.”

“We’ll help you,” Vilma stressed, giving his arm a gentle squeeze. “But you’re going to have to let us.”

He’d closed his eyes and was standing perfectly still.

“I so want to believe you.”

“What do you have to lose?” Vilma asked.

Jeremy’s mother tossed back her covers, exposing her skeletal frame.

“What does it matter?” his mother asked, throwing her bare feet over the side of the bed. “Once the darkness falls, there won’t be anyplace for the likes of us.”

Jeremy acted then, intercepting the woman before she could stand.

“Now that’s enough of that,” he told her, gently maneuvering her back into bed.

His mother was becoming agitated.

“It doesn’t matter what you do … what we do.… It’ll all end the same!” she cried.

Vilma looked toward the small glass window in the door for signs of a nurse or an orderly, certain they were going to be discovered. “We should probably leave now.”

Jeremy reached down and took hold of his mother’s ankles, picking her legs up, swinging them back onto the bed. Then he pulled the blankets up and covered her.

“I want you to stay in bed,” he instructed her firmly.

She reached up to cup his cheek in her hand. “You’re really a good boy, at heart,” she told him. “It’s too bad that doesn’t matter … that we’re all going to Hell.”

And with that, she squirmed down beneath the covers, pulling the blanket tightly under her chin.

Jeremy seemed shaken by his mother’s message as he went to stand beside Vilma.

“Are you all right?” she asked him.

He stared at his mother, who looked back from the bed, her wide eyes twinkling with madness.

“Couldn’t be better,” Jeremy said as his wings emerged, then closed about him.

Vilma summoned her own wings, giving Jeremy’s mother one final glance before she, too, took leave.

“See, beautiful wings of snow white,” the woman whispered as her hand sneaked out from beneath the blankets to wave good-bye.

With the angels gone, Jeremy’s mother slipped from her bed and padded across the cold floor.

She stopped for a moment where her son and the girl had just been standing and stuck out her tongue. She smacked her lips, tasting the magick of their departure which lingered in the air, and then, as it faded from her mouth, she turned her attention to the door to the room.

She’d sensed the arrival of the new patient, a girl, as soon as she’d entered the building, like somebody eagerly tickling her, only from the inside.

The woman tiptoed up to the door and peered cautiously through the small window at the darkened hall outside her room. It was empty except for a small table and chair, where an orderly usually sat, listening for sounds of nighttime distress from behind the closed doors that lined each side of the hall. The fluorescent light in the ceiling flickered like a strobe light, casting everything in dancing shadows.

Dancing shadows
, she mused.
The world will soon be engulfed in dancing shadows
.

Jeremy’s mother waited, sensing that it wouldn’t be long now. And she was right.

She heard the girl’s cries like a distant memory. They were
so familiar, they could have been her own. But they grew louder as they came closer to her room.

Ducking to the other side of the doorway, she could see down the opposite end of the corridor. There was a flurry of activity, doctors and nurses surrounded a wheelchair that was being pushed by one of the larger orderlies. In that chair sat a young lady. The one that she’d sensed. A young lady who moaned and cried as she clutched her pregnant belly.

“I don’t know what’s happening,” the girl wailed as she was wheeled down the hall. The staff ignored her as they talked amongst themselves, studying clipboards of information.

“I’m only sixteen. I’ve never … how can I be having a baby?”

Jeremy’s mother crouched under the window as they passed her room, only standing again when they’d gone by.

It’s happening sooner than expected
, she thought.

The doctors and their patient disappeared through the swinging doors on their way to the hospital’s basement level.

That was where it would happen.

That was where
he
would arrive.

She felt a sudden chill pass through her skeletal frame, and she walked back to her bed. It would be warm there.

Crawling beneath the covers, she imagined how it would soon be, lulling herself quickly to sleep with thoughts of a world filled with shadows.

Dancing shadows
.

* * *

The Morningstar hadn’t thought of the mysterious dark-haired child in more than a millennium, and now here he was, thinking of him for a second time today.

“There will come a day,”
the child had said, “
when the God that has abandoned you will have no power over the earth. The messengers of He who believes Himself most holy will no longer believe in Him, and they will attempt to exert their own beliefs on how things should be.”

Lucifer felt a cold, painful knot forming in the pit of his stomach as he heard the child’s voice echoing from the past.

“And darkness will claim the world.”

“Father?”

Lucifer spun toward the voice, his imagination conjuring the dark-haired child, a telling smile upon his beatific face.

“You okay?” Aaron asked.

“I’m fine,” he answered, attempting to shake off the effects of the chilling memory.

“We were talking about the end of the world, and you got sort of quiet.” His son paused, considering what he’d just said. “I guess that’s kind of appropriate.” The boy smiled weakly, attempting to lighten the pall of foreboding that hung about the room.

“You don’t think the Powers are still around, do you?” Aaron asked him.

“Possibly a smaller faction,” Lucifer replied. “Separated
from the rest perhaps. Sleepers, ordered to fulfill a specific task if Verchiel should fail.”

He saw a look of desperation appear upon his son’s face.

“What is it with them?” Aaron asked angrily. “They’d rather end the world than have us in it? I just don’t get it.”

Lucifer could understand his son’s frustration but could also identify with the Powers’ obsession, for he, too, had acted upon his own beliefs—though wrong—starting a war in Heaven with his Creator.

Only, he had learned the error of his ways, while the Powers just became more fixated. So beset, they were now willing to end the world in order to prove that they were right.

“They believe the Nephilim are a blight upon the planet, an insult to the Lord God, and have concocted a plan to see themselves victorious even if it means destroying all life upon the planet. Insane? Most definitely, but they see this as a final way to steal victory from defeat.”

Aaron considered his father’s words.

“I still don’t see how they believe that they’re carrying out God’s will by destroying the earth.”

The ball of tension grew tighter in the Morningstar’s stomach.

“Perhaps they no longer serve the Lord of Lords, feeling somehow betrayed by the fact that He initially allowed them to fail. Perhaps now they serve their own selfish purpose.”

“The messengers will no longer believe in Him,”
Lucifer heard the childlike voice echo in his mind.

Is this what the dark-haired boy foretold?
Lucifer pondered.
Is this the beginning of the end of the world, a prologue to dark times to come?

“We’re going to stop them, right?” Aaron asked.

“Of course,” Lucifer agreed, shaking off the distraction.

He pushed his chair back and moved around the desk, sitting on its corner as he thought about their situation.

“In order for Wormwood to be awakened, the Almighty created something called the instrument, which, when played, will signal the Angel of Desolation.”

“The instrument,” Aaron repeated. “Do you mean like Gabriel’s horn?”

“That’s exactly what I mean,” Lucifer said. “It started off in Gabriel’s possession but then found its way into the hands of different owners. Their job has been to watch and wait for a sign that it is time for the world to end.”

“Any idea who has it now?” Aaron asked.

Lucifer shook his head. “No. But if I don’t, then there’s a good chance that the Powers don’t either. And that will hopefully buy us some time.”

“We’re going to have to find whoever has it before they do,” Aaron said.

Lucifer slid from the desk. His brain felt like a nest of hornets, so much information flying around, buzzing for his attention.

“Something that divine … that powerful … must leave
some kind of trail,” Lucifer said. He stroked his chin in thought.

“If that was the case, wouldn’t the Powers be able to track it as well?” Aaron asked.

“Good point,” the Morningstar said. “But if they had been able to trace it, wouldn’t we all be dead by now?”

“So it doesn’t leave a trail,” Aaron said.

“Or it does, and it’s masked in some way.”

“Then if it’s masked, how would we find it?” Aaron wanted to know.

“Only the most sensitive could track something with the kind of power that instrument possesses,” Lucifer said. He went to the window and gazed out over the school grounds. Everything appeared so peaceful, but under the surface …

“Powerful magick is needed here,” Lucifer said, though the statement made him sorry. Lorelei didn’t need this added on top of everything else she was doing.

“Archon magick,” he said, turning from the window.

From the look on Aaron’s face, he knew his son understood the ramifications of what he was about to ask.

“We have to talk to Lorelei,” Aaron said.

Lucifer nodded sadly. “She’s the only one with the talent to help us.”

Vilma followed Jeremy’s trail to the school, and as she unfurled her wings, she found herself back where they had started.

Jeremy was just standing in the grassy area, head down, his
hands hanging loosely by his sides. His wings were growing smaller now, disappearing into his shoulders.

“Jeremy?” she asked, and as the word left her mouth, he turned and stepped toward her, his hands suddenly on her shoulders, drawing her gently closer.

He was about to kiss her, and she felt herself responding, reacting to the moment as if on some sort of autopilot. Vilma wrestled with these instincts, pushing them aside before things could get out of hand. She turned her face away from his, and Jeremy released her, stepping back.

“I’m sorry,” Jeremy stammered, instantly embarrassed. “That was bloody stupid, and inappropriate. I’m really, really sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Vilma answered awkwardly. She felt ashamed, even though nothing had happened.
But what if it had?
She had no idea why she had reacted in such a way. It was as if something had taken her over, like some sort of switch had been thrown, and she was doing what she was supposed to do.

But that shouldn’t have been it at all. Jeremy was a close friend, and she’d never really thought of him in any other way. She felt her body break out in a warm, tingling flush as the image of his lips coming closer to hers appeared in her head again.

“I never was really good with my emotions,” he attempted to explain. “And this business with my mum … damn it, I can be so dumb sometimes.”

“It’s fine,” Vilma told him, still flustered and wanting to pretend that it hadn’t happened … but could she? “A misunderstanding that’s already forgotten.”

“Forgotten by you,” he said with a weak laugh. “I’d be lying if I told you that I didn’t want it to happen … that I didn’t want to kiss you.”

“Jeremy …,” Vilma began. She felt it again, that twinge of heat, the beginning of desire. She didn’t like it, not one little bit.

“I was hoping for a better outcome, but it is what it is. You’re smitten with our fearless leader, which is fine. But you can’t blame a guy for trying.”

She forced herself to laugh. The emotionally damaged guy, true to form, returning to the protective armor of his edgy cockiness.

“If Mr. Tall-Dark-and-Chosen ever disappoints …”

“Stop,” she said, wanting him to quit before she forgot that she’d actually felt sorry for him not that long ago. They started to walk toward the classroom building to find the others when they saw Aaron standing there.

“Speak of the Devil’s son and he appears,” Jeremy said with a smirk.

“Aaron,” Vilma said, trying not to feel guilty but having a tremendously difficult time. “We were just heading in to find everyone.”

How long has he been standing there?
She would have to
talk to him later, try to explain what Jeremy had shared with her while they were away—and what he might have seen moments ago.

But could she explain it without hurting him in some way? It was complicated, and Vilma wasn’t even sure if she could explain it to herself.

“I was on my way to see Lorelei,” Aaron said. “Why don’t you come with me and I’ll fill you in as to what’s going on.”

Vilma cringed as she joined Aaron, half expecting Jeremy to throw out some wiseass comment to add more tension to the situation.

But Jeremy remained strangely quiet, although she could feel his eyes upon them, even after they were out of view.

F
red carried the unconscious Dusty up the back steps and into the kitchen of his home.

The place was a mess and stank of rot. The sink was piled high with dirty dishes; a cloud of flies buzzed around the bare ceiling bulb. He’d never quite gotten a handle on keeping a clean house, believing it to be women’s work.

And every time he tried to find that special someone to help take care of him and his home, well, his more bestial nature had always gotten the better of him.