The Fallen 3 (32 page)

But have I learned nothing?

This was what he asked of himself when the murderous urges arose.

No matter how abandoned he felt, the Creator had sent him back to a world where his offenses were nearly innumerable.

The Nephilim’s Chosen had defeated him in combat, sending him back to Heaven to face the Almighty’s judgment, to suffer for his sins, and this is where he now found himself. Was it punishment? Penance? Perhaps a mélange of both?

Verchiel was desperate, searching for answers that did not
come from the stain of a cross high upon a chapel wall.

What do you wish of me?

There was suddenly a shift in the air. A cool breeze within the structure caused some dry leaves to skitter across the warped wooden floor, and ruffled the feathers of his wings.

A sign of some kind?

Perhaps.

The angel heard the sound of the heavy wooden door slam closed behind him, and Verchiel slowly turned his head to see that he was no longer alone.

Aaron pulled open the heavy chapel door and stepped inside the gloomy space. He held the door to let Gabriel follow, before letting it close with an echoing boom behind them.

It took his eyes a moment to adjust to the semidarkened conditions, but he saw Verchiel up ahead, kneeling at the end of the center aisle leading up to the altar.

“I’m going to wait right here,”
Gabriel said, lying down upon the dusty floor.

Aaron started down the aisle, every footfall echoing in the space that had once been a place of worship but had been deconsecrated when the Catholic school and orphanage were abandoned.

He kept his eyes upon the angel’s back as he knelt, ramrod straight, his large wings closed tightly upon his back. There was no chance that Verchiel didn’t know he was there, but the angel remained silent.

Aaron stopped, not wanting to get too close, just in case. He had a hard time even thinking of Verchiel as an angel—a creature of Heaven. Because of what Verchiel had done to him, his family, and his friends, there wasn’t a chance that he could still be considered divine.

He thought that he’d seen the last of him, but here he was again to plague him.

Or maybe it was something more complex, as Vilma had suggested.

They were all in a terrible place. The Abomination of Desolation had done some serious damage, damage that could see the world falling into dark times if somebody with the proper skills didn’t stop the decline. The Nephilim’s numbers had been decimated, and Lucifer was among the missing. As it stood, there wasn’t much they could hope to do against the rising tide of evil.

Or was there?

Aaron stared at the angel, his gaze burning a hole into his back. He hated the thought of this, but maybe …
maybe
… this was how it was supposed to be.

Tired of waiting to be acknowledged, Aaron cleared his throat.

The angel remained silent, and Aaron began to wonder if the former Powers leader was asleep. Aaron moved closer, noting the black, paint-chip-like pieces of skin and burnt feathers that littered the floor, shed as Verchiel slowly healed
from the extensive injuries he’d received while fighting the angelic giant.

“Verchiel,” Aaron said, his voice echoing about the chapel.

At the last reverberation of his voice, there came a flurry of movement, as if the very shadows around him had been stirred, and Aaron was temporarily blinded by a flash of celestial fire. When he regained his sight, he found himself looking down the length of a burning sword.

“You disturb me at your own risk,” the angel said with a ferocious snarl.

Aaron could feel the heat of the blade upon his face, as well as the intensifying heat of his own anger. He knew he should tamp down his rage, but this was just too much for him to bear.

Aaron called upon that which made him Nephilim. Wings of ebony black sprouted from his back, punishing the air with a single beat and carrying him back and away from his enemy’s blade, as his own weapon of fire ignited in his grip.

“You draw a weapon on me at yours,” Aaron said.

“Aaron,”
Gabriel barked from the back of the chapel.
“This isn’t what we talked about.”

“I know, Gabe,” Aaron said, his sword still pointing at Verchiel. “I’m sure we’ll get to it eventually.”

Verchiel glared at him, eyes blazing with an inner fire fueled by hatred. “I asked not to be disturbed.”

“I’m afraid you don’t have that luxury anymore,” Aaron
said. “Besides, you’ve been in here for three days. It’s time to come out and face the world you’ve left us.”

“
I’ve
left you?” Verchiel asked with a tilt of his head. “This is a far darker place than I recall leaving it.”

“No thanks to you,” Aaron told him. “If it wasn’t for your soldiers stirring the shadows, I’m sure we—”

“Spare me,” Verchiel interrupted. “What happened to this place would have happened eventually.” He lowered his sword, dropping it to his side. “My soldiers just sped up the process a bit.”

Aaron repeated the gesture, but one better, wishing his weapon away in a crackling flash. “And here we are,” he said, flexing the muscles in his back, drawing his wings beneath his clothes and skin.

“And here we are,” Verchiel repeated, his own weapon disappearing in a whoosh and flash.

They stood there like that for quite some time, each daring the other to take the encounter to the next level.

Wanting to be away from the angel as soon as possible, Aaron decided to give in.

“I have no idea why you’re here,” he began.

“That makes two of us,” Verchiel responded.

“But you have to be here for something.”

Verchiel cocked his head bird-like to one side, as Aaron continued.

“The world … God’s world … is in a very bad place
right now, and that’s something that I intend to fix.”

Verchiel smirked.

“You’re going to fix it, Nephilim?” Verchiel asked. “And how, may I ask, do you intend to do that?”

“Don’t know,” Aaron said. “But I plan to find out.”

“Do you now?” Verchiel hissed.

“I’m the Chosen One,” Aaron said. “Written about in angelic prophecy … that has to count for something.”

The Powers’ leader shook his head ever so slowly.

“The audacity of your kind,” he said. “You actually believe that you’re something special. That there is something that you and yours can do to reconnect this world to Heaven.”

“If there’s a way, I’ll find it,” Aaron said. “And then I’ll do just that.”

Verchiel returned to the altar to kneel. “Leave me,” he said. “You make me despise myself even more than I already do for failing to destroy you and all your kind.”

Aaron stood there for a moment, trying to decide what he should do next. If he listened to the angry voice inside his head, he would storm off, leaving the angel alone in his misery. But Aaron was feeling above all that now that he’d had his say.

“I have no idea why the Creator sent you back here,” Aaron said. “But what if this
is
the reason?”

He paused, waiting for some kind of reaction that did not come.

“What if you’ve been sent back to help us?”

Verchiel continued to ignore the Nephilim.

“What if this is your penance?” Aaron suggested. “To help us keep the world safe, while trying to find a way to reconnect with Heaven and God.”

He waited again, but still the angel did not respond.

“Think about it,” Aaron said, turning away from Verchiel to walk down the aisle and meet up with Gabriel.

“C’mon, boy,” Aaron said to the Labrador. “We should leave him to his misery.”

Aaron’s hand had just closed upon the door handle when there came a voice.

“You do realize that we’re likely to fail miserably,” Verchiel called out.

Aaron looked back down the aisle. Verchiel still knelt there, his back to him.

“We’ll never know unless we try,” Aaron said.

Verchiel had no response.

Aaron pushed open the door, heading out into the premature darkness.

Into the End of Days.

T
he yetis moved across the merciless Siberian tundra, their white fur adorned in the blood of the Inuit tribe they had recently slaughtered.

More beast than man, the hairy monsters loped along the snow-covered landscape, no longer caring if their kind was seen. For centuries they had hidden from the eyes of civilization, but no longer.

A new age was beginning, and they would hide no more.

The tribal leader raised a clawed hand to the moaning winds, stopping their number.

His name was N’Karr, and it was he who had first heard the call of their master, the one who had brought about these special times for their monstrous kind.

A voice had spoken to him in a language birthed in shadow and not heard for multiple millennia. It urged him and his like
to emerge into the light, dragging the darkness behind them like a cloak for all the world to see.

“Come to me,”
the voice had called. “
Come to me and let nothing block your progress.”

And N’Karr and his yeti tribe crawled from their hiding places deep beneath glacial ice, answering the summons of their Dark Lord. These abominable snowmen did exactly what had been asked of them, even as they had come across the Inuit village. For an instant it had been difficult for N’Karr and his folk. Normally they had shunned the human encampments, choosing to remain invisible.

“But now it is different,”
cooed the voice of their master.
“Now is the time to bring fear to humanity.”

And this time the yetis did not turn away from discovery. They entered the Inuit camp without shame, killing with abandon.

Their fur stained with the blood of their prey.

Now N’Karr brought them to a stop, his keen senses picking up unusual scents in the frigid environment, scents that did not belong.

The yeti leader grunted for his legion to follow, and they scaled the jagged face of a mountainous formation of ice, the fierce Siberian winds threatening to tear them from their purchase.

N’Karr was the first to reach the top, squinting through the whipping snows to gaze down into a small valley. Below,
mysterious shapes formed a circle around a particular section of frozen ground.

The yetis roared, spilling down the sides of the ice wall to confront those waiting there. Wanting to again experience the bloodlust of the Inuit camp, the yetis charged. Then N’Karr—speaking in the language of shadows—ordered his people to halt.

There wasn’t a human among those that waited in the valley, monsters one and all. Monsters that had also answered the call of the Dark Master.

The yetis approached, sniffing the air rife with the scent of supernatural beasts.

N’Karr and his tribe joined the circle, no longer individual species of monster but one unified tribe, waiting for the arrival of the one that had liberated them.

The yeti’s gaze was drawn to the center of their circle, but all he saw there was ancient ice and shifting snow. He grew impatient, as did the other members of his tribe. He was about to roar his displeasure when a sound from the sky above filled the air, and a great shadow appeared overhead.

Panic passed through the circle as they gazed up into the snow-filled sky. An enormous shape, like a flying lizard, pounded the air with leathern wings.

Dragon
.

It glared down at them with glowing yellow eyes, and N’Karr was temporarily filled with terror, until sensing a kindred spirit in the great scaled and spine-covered beast.

The others sensed it too, all of them gazing up at the hovering dragon, waiting for it to act.

The dragon reared back its head, bending forward suddenly with its mouth agape, venom flowing from its mouth and igniting in a stream of orange flame that rushed to earth to engulf the center of their circle.

The heat was like nothing N’Karr had ever felt before, but he and his tribe, as well as the other beasts, did not break the circle.

They continued to stare at its center, waiting for their new Dark Lord to arrive.

The miles of ice and snow that he’d been trapped beneath gradually began to liquefy.

The dark child had been inexorably making his way to the surface, from far, far below, his progress halted by ancient ice, miles in thickness. But the ice did not stop him, it just slowed him down a bit.

This was very much like the time he had been waiting on the earth, putting plans in motion, some taking millennia to come to fruition.

But what was the passage of time to a being that had existed before the Creator brought forth the light? He had all the patience that was needed, and then some.

He thrashed beneath tons of snow as the intensity of the heat from above turned it to slush, climbing to the surface.

To a world that would soon belong to him.

The Dark One used the powerful wings of its shape to ascend all the faster. Everything had fallen into place as he had planned. Of course there had been some wrinkles here and there, but that was to be expected.

And sometimes these alternatives were pleasant surprises, ending up far better than what had been originally anticipated.

Like the body he now wore.

He’d always coveted it but never imagined that he would have the opportunity to take it as his own.

But the opportunity had presented itself. And the body was his.

The Dark One turned his new eyes to the boiling waters above his head, the light of the world above beckoning to him.

Beneath the scalding fluid, he spread his feathered wings of ebony, pushing through the water and propelling himself to the surface.

And to the adoration of those that awaited his ascension.

He exploded from the boiling water into the fires of a dragon’s breath, allowing the searing heat to dry his armored body. And there he hovered, wings flapping in the air, for all to see. He spread his arms, allowing them to take in his formally divine appearance.

They were all in awe of him, this he could tell. Many of them had known the form he wore from days long past, when it had belonged to the Son of the Morning.