Judgment Day (Templar Chronicles Book 5) (22 page)

“I was old before time began, before your ragged race took their first step on this waste of a Creation, and I will be here long after you and your kind are gone!

“I have soared over the Deep and stood shoulder to shoulder with my brethren as the rebellion caught fire and set the world alight!”

With each declaration the Forsaken One seemed to grow taller, larger. His voice gained power, too, until it was thundering in the enclosed space.

“I claim Michael, Gabriel, and Rapheal as my brothers; Raguel, Remiel and Saraquel as my sisters!

“I am the watcher in the dark, the chronicler of the ages, the beacon of light in the sea of confusion. I am the savior of prophets, the keeper of the truth, and the slayer of the chosen!

“I am Uriel, the Forsaken One!”

With that final declaration, he reached up and tore his robe to the waist, revealing himself to Cade.

He had dark hair and dark eyes to go with that symmetrical face, plus a body honed and hardened by years of conflict and training. His skin was the color of burnt sienna, but Cade almost didn’t notice because his attention was entirely captured by the tattoos that covered every square inch of exposed flesh that he could see; from the base of Uriel’s neck down to his stomach and continuing lower beneath his robe it looked like.

The tattoos twisted and moved and roamed about on his flesh like living breathing creations with a life all their own. Images rose to prominence as a scene played out Cade’s eyes and then fell into the background again as another took its place. Each of them were different than the one before and it didn’t take long for Cade to realize that he was watching events from the past, present, and quite possibly the future play out in an endless sequence on Uriel’s flesh.

Entranced, Cade reached out with one hand, only to draw it back before touching the other man when he realized what he was about to do. The sheer artistry of it all was enthralling, even when the scenes of light and beauty shifted to those of horror and war and suffering. Cade found himself slowly following the images as they moved from Uriel’s chest to his side and around to his back...

Then Cade stopped short.

The shocking ruin of Uriel’s back told another story entirely.

Two ragged clumps of tissue rose a few inches above the point where a human’s shoulder blades would be, all that remained of his once majestic wings, and those clumps still oozed black rivulets of blood that meandered down the angel’s lower back in tiny rivers of pain. The flesh surrounding the stubs was laced with old scars that marked where the blade had hacked and sliced at his flesh and Cade nearly recoiled in horror and empathy at the sight.

But there was a story here as well, in the ruin of that once glorious form, a story that Cade instinctively knew that he was supposed to witness, to see, and so he continued his circle around the angel until he returned to the place where he had started.

“And now, perhaps, you understand,” Uriel said quietly.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Uriel the archangel.

He is mentioned several times in the Christian Apocrypha, particularly the books of Enoch and Esdras, as one of the seven hosts who guarded the throne of heaven. Tradition held that he was the angel that had checked the doors of the Jews for lamb’s blood during the Passover plague in Egypt and the one that carried John the Baptist and his mother, Elizabeth, to join the holy family after their flight out of Egypt. Uriel was noted as being as pitiless as a demon in the Apocalypse of Peter, another extra-biblical text, and in the Life of Adam and Eve he is listed as the angel that helped to bury both Adam and Abel in Paradise.

Perhaps more importantly, given Cade’s current needs, Uriel was historically regarded as the angel of wisdom, the one who shines the light of God’s truth into the darkness. All that he had seen, all that he had witnessed, both the sublime and the horrendous, had been recorded on his flesh and transformed into a living collection of knowledge. It was from that collection that the angel drew the endless supply of wisdom that the angel was traditionally believed to dispense.

But Uriel was not the angel he had once been, that was clear. An angel’s power rested in his wings and Uriel had been stripped of those, either purposely or through an injury. As a result he had been reduced from a being of almost limitless power to something much less. He was still vastly more powerful than Cade, as he had so aptly illustrated already, but he was far from what he had once been.

All this flashed through Cade’s mind in an instant and he realized that he did, in fact, understand.

At some point in the distant past, Uriel had retreated from the fight. He’d left the battle between good and evil to those still equipped to carry it forth and had retreated into the shadows, to bear witness and record the conflict for future generations.

But what got Cade excited was the understanding that Uriel was a senior member of the heavenly host and by his own admission had been around since before the Fall. He had called the Adversary by name, which meant he had most likely known the fallen angel personally. There probably wasn’t anyone else on the planet – aside from the Adversary himself – who could tell Cade what he needed to know to rescue his wife.

And you’ve gone and pissed Uriel off.

Nice job, Williams.

Cade bowed his head briefly in a gesture of respect and then looked up again, meeting the angel’s stare.

“My apologies; I meant no disrespect. Perhaps we could start over?”

Uriel sighed and turned away, walking over to the nearest window to stare out into the night. Over his shoulder, he said, “You cannot save Gabrielle; you can only set her free.”

Set her free?

Cade didn’t like the sound of that.

“What does that mean?” he asked, a bit more harshly than he intended as his heart rate kicked up.

Get a grip, man.

Uriel either didn’t notice or chose to ignore his tone.

“Asharael began altering your wife’s body the moment he took control of it, bending and morphing it to his will. That kind of physical change comes at a terrible price. It is only his presence within her flesh that is keeping the damage he has caused from crippling her or killing her outright. He can keep her body alive indefinitely in this fashion. If you remove that protection, however...”

Cade stared at him, unhappy with what he was hearing.

“Let me get this straight,” he said, pointing a finger in Uriel’s direction, “you’re telling me that if I succeed in freeing Gabrielle from the Adversary’s control, she’ll die?”

Uriel nodded. “Yes. Probably within seconds and in a very grisly fashion.”

Cade shook his head. “No. No, that can’t be right. There has to be a way!”

“Believe me when I tell you that there is not.”

All the fear and pain and despair that he’d been harboring for the last few weeks came pouring up from deep inside and Cade suddenly lost it. Within moments he was hollering at the angel standing in front of him.

“Fuck you!” he yelled as he paced back and forth in front of Uriel. “Just fuck you! What the hell do you know, anyway? You’re just some sorry sack of shit with his wings ripped off! I know there’s a way; there has to be!”

Uriel didn’t say anything; he just stood there and calmly watched Cade pace back and forth while shaking his fist in the angel’s direction.

“No, you’re wrong. You have to be wrong. There’s no way I’m letting that bastard do this. No fucking way!”

“You have to.”

The declaration brought Cade up short. He spun around to face the crippled angel, anger on his face.

“What did you just say?”

Uriel met his gaze calmly. “You have to let Asharael win. He must remain in possession of your wife’s body.”

“Like hell he will!”

Cade was quickly becoming convinced that this was a complete waste of time. Uriel had clearly spent too much time locked away from the world in this tower to know what needed to be done. Cade had to get out of here, get back to the mainland, and from there he could...

“This is not a question of choice,” Uriel said to him, capturing Cade’s attention with the hard, relentless tone in his voice. “You let the Adversary escape twice before but you cannot do so a third time. He has been preparing to return his entire scream of angels to this plane and if that happens – if he is united with his former allies – there will be no end to the suffering they will cause.”

It took everything Cade had not to laugh. “You don’t seem to get it,” he said. “The world can go to hell for all I care. I’m done with trying to do the right thing. All I want to do is rescue my wife; she’s been suffering at that bastard’s hands long enough!”

Uriel stepped closer. “No,” he said, with a tang of steel in his voice, “it is
you
who do not seem to get it.”

Without warning, he reached out and grabbed Cade’s arm.

One moment Cade was standing in the clock tower arguing with the injured angel, the next the two of them were standing on an ash-strewn plain staring out at the remains of a bombed-out city in the distance. Most of the buildings had been reduced to nothing more than piles of rubble, but a single tower with a large clock on it rose defiantly through the twisting, churning smoke that seemed to be drifting everywhere. Something about the tower looked familiar, but it took Cade several minutes of staring at it before he recognized it as Big Ben.

If that is Big Ben,
he thought,
that meant the city he was looking at, the one that looked more like an apocalyptic wasteland than a city, was London.

Cade gazed around in disbelief.

What the hell had happened here?

Before he could ask, his attention was drawn to a ragtag group of survivors making their way across the plain before them. They were picking their way through the rubble, occasionally glancing upward into the haze-filled sky above. Cade counted two men, three women, and a small child. He turned a questioning look in Uriel’s direction, but the angel kept watching the tableau before them and Cade turned back to do the same.

He was just in time.

One minute the group before them was fine and the next a shadow swept over them from the clouds above, so fast that Cade nearly missed it, and when it was gone the bodies of the two men lay in the dust, blood spurting from the stumps of their necks where their heads used to be.

The women scattered, running pell-mell away from the bodies of their companions as fast as their feet would carry them across the broken terrain. They ran in silence, though Cade could feel the screams that threatened to burst from their lips as if they were his own. Not once did they look up, which Cade found odd, until he realized that if they did they risked breaking an ankle or falling due to the uneven ground beneath their feet.

Cade wasn’t sure if he’d have the discipline to do that, knowing that death rode the air currents somewhere above them.

The child? Where’s the child?
he thought suddenly.

He scanned the landscape before him. At first he thought she must have fallen in the initial attack, like the two men, but then he saw her, crouched in the shadows between two large pieces of cement near one of the bodies, like a rabbit trying to hide in a shallow bundle.

She was a sitting duck. If that thing came back it would snatch her from her hidey-hole in an instant.

He started forward, intending to pull her free and protect her if it came to that, only to find he couldn’t move; Uriel’s iron grip on his arm prevented him from moving.

“Let go! I’ve got to help her!”

Uriel didn’t even look at him as he said, “You are not really here; there is nothing you can do but bear witness to what is to come. Besides, she is not the one in danger. Watch and learn!”

Confused, Cade turned back to the scene before him and was just in time to see a large, hulking shape land in front of one of the women, its large leathery wings stirring up dust as they pounded the air around it. It stood on backward jointed legs that seemed too thin to support its enormous weight and it towered over the woman, at least eight feet tall if it was an inch. An enormous mouth filled most of its face and large, batlike ears jutted from the sides of its head.

The woman screamed at the sight and turned to go, but the creature’s hands shot out and grabbed her around her upper arms, dragging her closer. The hideous head dipped and Cade could only stand and watch in horror as the creature bit into the flesh of the woman’s forehead and then yanked it’s head downward, tearing the flesh right off its victim’s skull.

The creature dropped the woman’s twitching form at its feet as it stared directly at Cade and sucked that hanging flap of skin up into its mouth like a candied treat. Then it bent to take another bite.

Cade opened his mouth to scream in defiance but the world tipped sideways before he could give voice to his cry and he found himself standing back in the small room at the top of the bell tower next to Uriel.

He yanked his arm free from the other’s grip and stepped away from the wingless angel, visibly shaken. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to rid them of the sight of that freak-show escapee tearing the flesh from that woman’s face.

After a moment, when he’d swallowed the rising tide of gore in his throat and had calmed down enough to speak, he asked, “What the hell was that?”

Uriel was silent for a moment and then said, “That was Kabaiel, one of the seven in Asharael’s scream, in the reworked body of the human host selected for him.”

“Selected? By whom?”

“Asharael. The one you know as the Adversary.”

“Is that what he’ll do to Gabrielle?” Cade asked.

Uriel didn’t even try to soften the blow.

“Yes. She is strong and might last longer than most, but eventually Asharael’s nature will surface and her flesh will be permanently remade in his image.”

Cade shuddered at the thought. After seeing what he’d just seen, he wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy.

“And London? What happened to the city?”

“If Asharael succeeds in bringing his scream back into bodily form, it won’t be long before they will regain the full scope of their former powers. They will turn man against man, nation against nation, until civilization as we know it will destroy itself and from the ashes seven new kingdoms will rise, kingdoms ruled by the Fallen. The scene you witnessed will repeat itself thousands of times over until the human race is all but decimated.”