Betrayal (The Divine, Book Two) (2 page)

I looked at Rachel again. “Please get under the desk,” I said.
 

She glanced over to the angels on the other side of the workspace, then dropped to her knees and crawled under it.
 

“Diuscrucis?” one of the angels asked. Silas. He had replaced Moses as the elder seraph at the Catskill Sanctuary. An old, wise angel, we had worked together a number of times.
 

I reached behind my back, unclipping the simple, mortal sword from its sheath and holding it up in front of me. I traced the polished steel with my eyes. No runes, no magic, just straight up sharp, pointy metal.
 

“Myself,” I said, leaping over the desk and removing Silas’ head. In the same motion I pulled one of the revolvers to me, firing a bullseye right between Alyle’s eyes. It wouldn’t kill the demon, but it sent the desired message.

The angels turned on me. The devils turned on me. For a moment they forgot about their own war. For once there was a more important threat. I let off the remaining five rounds in the revolver, perfect hits on five of the devils, and then roared, my body shifting and growing, turning into something wholly inhuman; a massive form of muscle and strength and bone. I felt a sword dig deep into my thigh, but I ignored it. I pounced forward and ripped into the devils, my massive claws shredding them.
 

They tried to run, but the elevator shaft was small, and it made a lousy escape route. I smothered them with my size and speed, tearing and ripping into them with a visceral fury that rose into my consciousness whenever I took the Great Were’s natural form.
 

I could smell the angels regrouping behind me, organizing themselves for a combined attack on my flank. Alyle was with them, joining in their fight against me, accepting their wordless request for help. It was an interesting development. It wouldn’t help them. I crushed the final two devils, and then gave up Ulnyx’s form, becoming man-sized once more. I pulled my sword to me and stood stiff straight before the remaining angels.

“Why?” the fallen angel asked. I knew the question would be echoing through all of their minds.
 

“Balance,” I said. I had learned that it was the answer to everything that didn’t make sense.
 

I danced forward, a black clothed blur through the line of angels. They fought well, but Josette had been the best of them before she had become part of me, before my own power had been mixed with hers. It was over in a blink.
 

I took a cloth from my jeans pocket and wiped down the blade, and then dropped it to the floor. I returned the sword to the scabbard on my back. The angels were already dissolving, first to dust, then to nothing.
 

I walked over to the desk. “You can come out now,” I said to Rachel. I could hear her knees sliding along the floor, and then her head popped up over the edge of the desk.
 

Forty five years old, short brown hair cut in a bob, brown eyes, a little overweight. She was intelligent, compassionate, and a staunch supporter of good. She put her hands on the desk and pulled herself to her feet. She knew I wasn’t going to kill her, so her fear had fallen to the background.

“Balance?” she asked.

I sighed. “The cause and the effect,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about how to resolve it.”

She tilted her head. “So you’ve decided to just kill everything?”

“Not everything. You’re still alive,” I said.

She frowned. “What happened to you?” she asked.

Where should I start? I had met Rachel only a few months after I had recovered the Grail. She had been instrumental in providing the resources I had needed to reset the balance - finances, transportation, information when she had it, and something more.

“I always told you that things would change when the balance was reached,” I said.

“You know that’s not what I’m talking about,” she replied.
 

I knew, but I didn’t want to talk about it. Rachel had been there for me when I had needed a friend more than anything. No, not a friend. A mother of sorts. She had done a better job in the few years I had known her than my biological mother ever had. She was one of the few who could even pretend to understand what it was like to be me. That I was unable to relate to her, to be close to her, to even remember what that was...
 

“Landon,” she said, her voice concerned. It snapped me out of my useless introspection.

“Memories,” I said at last. “I’ve tried to fight them, but I can’t escape. I’m tired of trying.”
 

Charis had known what would happen. She had known because she had gone through it. Maybe it had taken her almost two hundred years, but she wasn’t me. I had never handled it well. I tried so hard to handle it, but I was drowning. I knew the knowledge she was waiting for me to find would be my salvation. It had to be.

“There’s something else I need,” I said, shaking off the heaviness. “Your database.”

Rachel looked back at her computer monitor. “My database? What for?”

Whispers and hope. My search for information had brought me to Shanghai, China, where I had spoken to a minor fiend who also happened to be one of the Asian archfiend’s top spies. He had told me of the whispers. That the angels were passing encrypted messages through the most benign pathways. That not all of the angels knew about it. I suspected that Rachel’s charity’s financial transactions might be one of their transports.
 

“Research,” I said.
 

She looked back at me. “Let me help you,” she said. “I know I don’t understand what you’re going through, but you need someone to ground you.”

“No,” I replied. “You can’t help me like that now that the balance is steady. Even if you could, if you did you would fall. I know how old you really are. You wouldn’t survive.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out a thumb drive. I handed it to her. “Please, just copy your database to the drive.”

I walked out of the Taylor building through the front door, a loaded USB drive tucked away in my leather jacket’s inside pocket. I slipped across the street and looked up towards the top of the building, expecting to see Rachel standing at the window, waiting for me to step out into the night. She wasn’t there. Unexpected, but not surprising.

I had been holding two bases of operation for the last five years. The first was the hidden excavation beneath the Statue of Liberty, where Rebecca had once lived. The second was my original room near the top of the Belmont Hotel. Rachel had spent months of her life trying to talk me into moving to a different location - she had gone so far as to offer me the penthouse of one of the residential towers her corporation owned. It had been tempting in the beginning, but what kind of mortal comforts did I need? I didn’t sleep. I didn’t eat. I didn’t even void. I was a ghost with mass and kinetic energy.
 

The Belmont was familiar, and I could still feel the charge in the air from the night I had spent learning swordplay with Josette. I didn’t know if it was real, or my memories making it real. Either way I didn’t care. It was comfortable. The Statue... Everything about the Statue oozed Rebecca, right down to the bottle of perfume she had kept in the nightstand drawer next to her bed. I didn’t sit there and sniff it or anything as forlorn as that. What I had done was study her books, study the runes, and keep up the hope that one of these days I’d go down there and she’d be there waiting. Waiting to explain what she had done, and why. It was almost as big of a mystery to me as Charis’ words.
 

“Survival,” she had said. It could mean so many things. I had thought she had allied with me because I was her best shot at it. Obviously, I had been wrong.

I had been too sensitive. I had cared too much, too quickly. I had gotten burned by mortal fire, burned by hellfire, burned by trust. You couldn’t fight the Divine and care about anything. The alternative was to suffer pain and loss over, and over, and over again. When it was one of the only things that could hurt you, feelings became the enemy. Like I said, I liked to lie to myself.

I felt a slight pressure in my head and a tingle that floated down my spine towards the place that I identified as my soul’s cage. I couldn’t help but smile. I sat down cross-legged in the center of the street, ignoring the cars that swerved smoothly around me.
 

“I’m here Sarah,” I said, opening myself up to the connection.
 

“Hey, Landon,” Sarah said, her voice clear in my mind.
 

She had changed so much since the first time we had met, when she had helped me find the answers I didn’t even know I was seeking. She had been a child then, but never just a child. She was a true diuscrucis, the only one in existence, born of the non-consensual union between a demon and an angel. The angel was Josette. The demon was Gervais, her brother, an archfiend operating out of Paris, France. I had never confronted him for fear of revealing Sarah. That didn’t mean I didn’t know where he was.

Josette had asked me to protect her. Sarah herself had named me protector before I had even known it would come to be. Could she see the future? She said she couldn’t, but she was the one person who could lie to me. If she could, she never let on.
 

“What’s up kiddo?” I asked.
 

The only time I could feel my soul breathing was when Sarah connected to me. I was her protector, and I would never let her see me sweat, never let her see what my world had become.
 

“Just checking up on you. When are you coming by to do some more of that ninja training of yours?” she said.
 

Her voice was light, cheerful. So unlike how she had been the first time we had met. Knowing she was safe had allowed her to grow, to blossom, and to live as though she were almost normal. She was still residing underground with the other Awake, but she went to High School, had mortal friends, and even mortal crushes. Nobody in the world knew she was different except me, though she needed to be more careful about not revealing her ability to See.
 

I reached into my pocket and touched the USB drive. “I’m doing great sweets,” I said, pushing my mental voice up an octave to sound more chipper than I felt. “Maybe tomorrow night? I’m on my way back to the Belmont to do some research.”

I had spent hundreds of hours over the last three years teaching Sarah everything I... no, her mother knew about fighting. I found a certain measure of comfort in being able to give her something of Josette’s that she could hold on to, even if she didn’t know, or at least didn’t say she knew, where that particular skillset had come from.

Her laughter boomed in my head. “You’re sitting in the middle of traffic,” she said. “Do you have to do that?”

It was one of the differences between a directly descended diuscrucis and a facsimile like me. She knew exactly where I was, all of the time. All she had to do was think about me, and she could See me. I couldn’t do the same, but I knew it brought her great comfort to always know where I was.
 

“To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about it,” I admitted, getting back to my feet and finishing my trip across the road. I had become so accustomed to the mortal world circulating around me, at times I almost forgot it even existed. “How was school today?”

“It’s always an adventure,” she said. “Katie Winslow and her gang tried to prank me again by swapping my Coke for a can of urine. Somehow it ended up on Katie’s head. Just because they think I’m blind doesn’t mean I have no sense of smell.”

I laughed. A rarity these days, unheard of unless I was talking to Sarah. She had gotten into a couple of scrapes with the school princess already, mainly owing to her perceived disability and the complete lack of imaginative mischief that stemmed from it. She had always gotten the upper hand, and her payback was well measured and deserved.

“What did the principal say?” I asked.
 

She laughed again. “He said I should have made her drink it. I’m not the only one she tries to torment, I’m just the only one who fights back.”

“I’m sure you’d love nothing more than to put your foot up her ass,” I said. She had expressed as much in the past, but doing so would risk giving up her faux blindness. How would she explain
that
away?
 

“I’ve been thinking about that. What I’d love to do even more is Command her to put her foot up her own ass.”
 

The statement made me raise an eyebrow. Even though she was a diuscrucis, she had always leaned good. The way she took care of the Awake down in the tunnels, her desire to help her fellow targets at school. Commanding was a demonic ability, and not one to be used lightly. It was out of character.

“Are you okay?” I asked.
 

There was the slightest pause. Just long enough for me to know she wasn’t. “I’m fine, brother,” she said. “I’m just getting fed up with that witch and her cackling minions. Anyway, I’m headed to bed. I wanted to check in on you and say goodnight.”

I could feel the temporary relief waning into the background at the words. It wasn’t as if I didn’t know they were coming. “Goodnight, sister,” I said. “I love you.”

“I love you too,” she replied. I expected her to break the connection, but there was a pause. When her mental voice returned, it was hushed. “Brother, be careful. You may find the answers that you seek, but you may also wish you hadn’t.”
 

I wanted to ask her what she meant, what she had seen or felt about my future. I couldn’t, because she broke the connection. That was something else she had me beat on. The call was one way. I briefly considered heading underground, but there was no point. If she had wanted to say more, she would have.
 

“I love you too.”
 

The words echoed in my mind, bringing back a familiar memory that didn’t belong to me. I found desperate purchase against the wall of the nearest building, trying to ground myself before the past could overtake me. My vision went dark, the sounds of the city fading out and history, terrible history taking its place.