Plague of Angels (5 page)

In front of Mary, swaying in a motion that had nothing to do with the storm, was the largest snake she had ever seen. It was Nyx, and Mary knew it. And Nyx knew that could not be allowed.

Forget.

The command reverberated through Mary’s body, shaking her to her soul. She could do nothing but obey, and the sight of Nyx changing into a snake fell from her mind, even as she collapsed over backwards.

Nyx raced away, still cursing the Angels in her head. What she had done to Mary was not enough. The woman would remember soon, if Nyx did not do more, but it would buy her enough time to escape the storm and spare Mary any more of the Angels’ wrath.

Mary blinked and found herself looking at the cross. The sight of her son’s body, hanging loosely on the cross, soaked through her like the rain had soaked her clothes, embedded itself into her mind and drove away all other thoughts.

The rain and wind raged and warred for control of the air around the hill, but Mary saw none of it. There was only her son’s body. Even now, it was beautiful. But He was gone. Her son was gone.

The winds abated, the hail ceased, and the rain stopped driving sideways and fell steadily to Earth. An eerie silence came over the hill and Mary, her wet clothes clinging to her skin, shivered. The few who remained with Mary rose to their feet. Hannah, Mary’s dearest friend, put her strong hands on Mary’s shoulder.

“Come, Mary,” Hannah urged gently, seeing the agony in her friend’s face. “We need to find the others. We need to take Him down.”

She felt John’s strong arms come around her—silly John, she thought absently. She saw Joseph and Nicodemus stepping forward with a box of tools and a small ladder. Two others had brought a stretcher and sheets to wrap his body until the proper rite could be performed.

In front of the cross, Mary wept for the loss of her child.

Chapter 2

Mary sat alone
in her small room in Joseph of Arimathea’s house, looking out the window and trying to remember.

The soldiers had chased them off when they had attempted to bring down Jesus’s body, and would have left Him there had Joseph not gone to Pilate and asked for the body to be buried before sunset in accordance with tradition. Pilate had shown mercy and relented, and they had taken Him first to Joseph’s house, where they cleaned His broken flesh. Mary, who had thought she had no tears left, wept at the sight of His battered, cut, and broken body, and gently ran the cloths over His flesh, cleaning Him as she had done when He was an infant, tenderly washing the blood and dirt from His slack, tear-stained cheeks even as her own tears fell upon Him.

And there was something more….

He had been such a sweet child, she thought. No crying, no screaming, but always watchful.

But there was something else…

She had kissed Him and wrapped Him in linen, and followed as they placed Him in His tomb, and wept as they pushed the rock into place.

It was good of Joseph, thought Mary. Good of Him to give my son a proper place to rest.

But there was something she had forgotten. Something important…

“Hello, Mary,” said Mary Magdalene, from the doorway.

Mother Mary turned and gasped in relief. “There you are! I was so worried when you vanished. There was the storm and the lightning and I wondered if I might die. And then you came and…”

Memory sprung back unbidden, and Mary stood so suddenly her small chair tumbled over. She stumbled backwards to the wall, pressing herself against it…Mary’s mouth went wide with fear, gaping desperately, but no sound would come out.

Another bolt of lightning struck, knocking her to the ground and turning the world momentarily white. Rock shattered, and its dust rained down on Mary’s face and hair. She coughed on dusty air, opening her eyes tentatively, and saw…

“Shh,” said Nyx, keeping her voice gentle even as she used her power to take away the woman’s ability to shout. “It’s all right.”

Mary’s words, when they came out, were whispers. “You demon,” she hissed. “You monster. What are you? How dare you be near my son! How dare you have pretended to be His friend! Get away!”

Nyx closed the distance between them so fast that Mary didn’t have time to blink. Her red serpentine eyes flashed with anger. Terrified, Mary pressed herself harder against the wall. And though Nyx’s words were pitched so that only Mary could hear them, the fury in them was unmistakable. “Do not say that I
pretended
,” she hissed. “He was mine!”

Mary was frightened, more frightened than she had ever been in her life. But she would not allow this demon to see it. “You are a monster!”

Nyx’s first instinct was to tear into Mary’s flesh, to disembowel and punish this mortal for daring to judge her. Nyx suppressed the instinct ruthlessly.
She knows nothing
, Nyx reminded herself.
She is innocent. She didn’t want any of this.

To Mary’s surprise, Mary Magdalene smiled at her, and the smile was gentle and filled with pity. “I’m an Angel.”

Then the world went black, and Mary was back on the hill in the rain.

The snake was before her again, its fanned, hooded head swaying rhythmically back and forth as if dancing to an unheard flute. Around them, time slowed. The raindrops, near-invisible before, became slow-moving diamonds, shining bright in the lightning that had come so close to killing them all. Mary felt that she could reach out and catch each single drop of water and drink them one by one before they hit the ground.

And as she watched, a feeling of peace and joy crept over her. She was drunk without an ounce of wine; she was in rapture without the touch of a man. And yet even in this peaceful trance, she was still afraid of the snake before her. Part of her wanted to flee, to escape the snake that was smothering her will.

Then the urge to flee, too, was smothered, and all she could do was stand in diamond rain, watching the snake’s muscles rippling beneath its glossy scales.

Please,
thought Mary.
Please don’t hurt me. My son has just died and I…

I am so tired.

The snake transformed, and Mary Magdalene stood before her. And even though it was only a dream—it could only be a dream—Mary Magdalene’s hands were as warm and strong as they had always been.

And then Mary Magdalene shimmered again, and she was suddenly so much taller and wearing a crown and clad in black scaled armor and her serpent eyes burned with a fire that matched the flaming glow of her black wings. She was a Dark Angel, and she wrapped Mary in her power.

Mary tried to call out, to scream for help against this being who had claimed all her senses, but she could not make a sound. She remembered the nightmares she had had as a child, in which she had tried to speak but no matter her effort, couldn’t.

Maybe this is a nightmare,
Mary thought.
Maybe it’s all a nightmare. Maybe there is no serpent, no storm, and maybe they didn’t murder my son. Please God, let me wake and find Him alive again.

For the briefest of moments, she saw them. She saw Joseph—her Joseph—lying in his bed, asleep after a long day’s work, and heard her children laughing and saw her son standing among His brother and sisters, His shining face untouched by age or pain.

Please, God. Please.

She blinked and the vision was gone, and she was on the hill with the snake/Mary/Angel in front of her, and her son was dead again. Her whole body sagged with anguish.

The body of the Angel began to sway, mimicking the hypnotic undulations of the snake. The hands that held Mary’s were tipped with silver talons, sharp and deadly and beautiful. The woman’s eyes were still the eyes of the snake, and they bore into Mary’s soul.

The Dark Angel smiled, and Mary’s breath went away. Suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to be this creature’s friend, to serve it and to be with it, to be lost inside those serpentine eyes for eternity.

And then the Angel was gone, and Mary Magdalene was standing there, tears flowing down her face. “I loved Him, Mary,” she said. “I loved Him, but I had to leave.”

The memory of Mary Magdalene turning into the snake faded to nothingness, and scattered from Mary’s mind. All she remembered was poor Mary Magdalene, fleeing in her grief as the storm raged around them.

Her eyes opened and she was alone in her room. A gentle breeze had picked up, cooling sweat that the day’s heat had brought to her skin. She sighed, and then straightened. There were things to be done, preparations to make.

He had told her, before He left that fateful night, that He would rise again. And though she had shaken her head at the time, and worried about Him, now the words gave her hope, and she allowed herself to dare dream of seeing her son again.

He said three days, Mary thought, rising and heading for the kitchen. Surely there was some task she could do while she was here. He will rise. He gave me his word.

Nyx waited, and brooded.

Tribunal had said that she would know when God’s judgment had come. That she would feel it. Night had fallen, Tribunal was dead, and still there was no change in the world, no sign that He had made a decision.

Nyx hissed in frustration, and for a brief moment the eyes in her mortal form burned red. She snuffed the light out at once, even though there was none to see it, and stepped out into the streets of Jerusalem.

If there is nothing to do but wait, I will wait
, she thought.

Nyx changed her form to that of a young, handsome man and walked the streets of Jerusalem. She was female, and preferred the form of a woman most of the time. But this night she wanted not to be disturbed, and a young woman walking the streets of Jerusalem at night was not likely to go unmolested. So she became he, for a short time. And she/he wandered the streets, past the houses of the rich and of the poor, through the empty market and dark alleyways and well-lit streets where men reveled far into the night.

Nyx could feel every mortal around her. She sensed them sleeping, eating, talking, fucking, crying, laughing, fighting, and abusing one another, these humans her Tribunal had been sent here to judge. In one of the alleys she could sense thieves, waiting to kill her. She smiled at them as they came close, and they fled from her red serpent eyes and mouth full of gleaming, razor-sharp teeth.

Nyx listened to the sounds coming through the walls of the houses. She heard quiet conversations, arguments over money and parents singing to their children. She heard cries of joy, pain and outrage. She amused herself by marking in her mind which of these mortals she would see again after they died. So many of them were Hell-bound. If they knew what horrors awaited them, she wondered, would they be able to control their impulses?

At one house she heard the cries of children in pain, one after the other, and the grunt of the man who was taking his pleasure on them. Nyx stopped on the street and listened. The noise angered her in a way she couldn’t understand. She had little but contempt for the humans, but a child was innocent. It had no power to help itself…

I will look forward to seeing this man in Hell,
Nyx thought.
Assuming that bastard Lucifer hands Hell back to me.

Part of Nyx hoped he wouldn’t. She was still enraged by the death of her Tribunal, and was ready to lash out and kill. She would tear the entire mortal world to pieces, if she could, and then go back to Hell and rain fire and destruction on Lucifer and all those who opposed her.

She heard another child in the house cry out and heard the man’s breath quicken.

I am the Queen of Hell,
Nyx thought.
It’s my job to punish the wicked.

She kicked in the door of the house and stepped inside. The child’s cries of pain turned into screams of horror. A shutter shattered as the man flew through it, to land broken on the street, his life bleeding out through the hole where his genitals had been.

He said wait,
Nyx reminded herself, as she stepped back into the street.
He didn’t say I couldn’t punish the wicked while I did.

In a street known for its prostitutes, a man came up to Nyx and, seeing her as an attractive young man, gave her a proposition. She smiled at him, accepted his coin, and let him lead her into an alleyway. She leaned back against the wall as the man knelt before her and took the male part of her mortal flesh in his mouth. She tried to concentrate on the feeling of pleasure, but it was nothing compared to that searing ecstasy she had felt in the arms of Tribunal.

The rage she’d been trying to hold back flooded her.
How dare these humans kill my beloved? How dare they even walk the face of this Earth?

The man rose to his feet and grabbed Nyx’s shoulders, turning and pushing her face first against the wall before shoving her robe up to her slim, narrow hips. Nyx let the man penetrate her, even as her teeth changed to razor sharp fangs.

This human will die first. And when Tribunal comes, the rest of them will die, too.

The man thrust harder, trying to make Nyx cry out. She didn’t oblige him. Her fingernails turned to talons, digging into the clay wall of the building. She would wait until the man was near climax, she decided, then rip his manhood off as she had the pedophile’s. Only this one’s she would shove so far into his ass that it would burst out his mouth.

Then I’ll kill everyone else in the streets.

A familiar scent wafted into Nyx’s nose, a familiar sound floated in the air. It caught her whole attention, and the man pounding into her false body was forgotten.

Judas.

To leave one’s mortal body in spirit form was easy for an Angel, even if her body was standing face first against a wall, subjected to a man’s vigorous thrusting. Nyx floated out of her flesh. Her spirit form was that of her true, female, white-skinned, black-winged self. She flew through walls, unseen by human eyes, past busily engaged couples and trios and more, to the room where Judas was rutting on the body of a girl who had just entered womanhood. The girl cried out and moved beneath him, her ecstasy almost convincing as she wrapped her arms and legs around him and bucked her hips in an effort to make him finish faster.