The Tenth Order (41 page)

The Throne pursed her lips, her expression unreadable. “And if my knowledge leads to the destruction of the Apkallu? Of
all
the Apkallu…w
ould you still want to know?”

Hunter didn’t even pause. “Tell me.”

Eli led the way through the wet stone passageway of the underground city, and Valdis limped behind him. Beside the priest, Detective Riese moved smoothly, her eyes latched on the back of Eli’s head. Valdis felt a pang of momentary envy—he would have killed for the young woman’s endurance.

Next to Eli walked the General and the Captain of the Order of Venus. Despite their age they kept pace with the young man, only occasionally having to slow down and catch their breath. It was another reminder how out of shape Valdis was.

I swear, Lord, if we get out of this I’m getting a Bowflex.

The weeping walls closed around them as they navigated the maze of tunnels. Valdis was surprised they hadn’t been joined by some of the guards, but guessed the Order’s manpower was running pretty low these days. In years previous, the priest knew, The Order of Venus had flourished. Especially during the Crusades. Jerusalem had been a perfect recruiting ground back then; a meeting place of varied cultures who shared a love of a single God and a desperate need to destroy something. Preferably something of a different faith.

It had been manuscripts from those battles—first-hand accounts preserved for hundreds of years and finally put together by the priest—that had tipped off Valdis to the Order’s location. An educated guess, but a guess none-the-less.

In modern days, where faith was as strong as your next status update, Valdis doubted the Order had been able to maintain a population of more than a hundred. Under different circumstances Valdis would have volunteered to join—they undoubtedly had knowledge that would make the Church of Rome weep—but the priest had come too far with Hunter. The Power held the keys to the mysteries that plagued Valdis. Questions that started over fifty years ago, the first time he saw his father perform a miracle.

The image was still fresh in his mind. Valdis’ father standing over the medicine box, singing with a voice the priest had never heard before, the notes twisting, warping, changing into—

Eli suddenly held up his hand, stopping, and Valdis nearly crashed into his back. He caught himself just in time, his memory bursting like a soap bubble.
Stupid, stupid, stupid old man,
he cursed silently.
Pay attention.

Shining a flashlight at the wall in front of them, Eli said, “We’re here.”

Valdis leaned against a wall, panting like a dog in summer, and watched the boy’s flashlight play across the stone wall. It was a long horizontal passageway that lay perpendicular to the party’s current tunnel, leading off in both directions and disappearing into gloom. Valdis squinted in the dim light—somewhere along the way the glow had given out and they had been forced to navigate by flashlight—hoping for...

“Yes!” Valdis cried, pushing past Eli and running his hands across the cold stone. It was the same passageway, the one that had led them from the discothèque, the corridor with the sweeping, angular cross marks that made up the Enochian alphabet. The priest smiled widely, close to tears, tracing his fingers across the ancient markings.

The moisture ran across his palm in cold, damp currents; not strong enough to be considered a stream, but too concentrated for mist. The academic in Valdis wondered how these markings had lasted in these conditions, but he was too taken with the writing to focus on anything else. Here they were.
Answers.

“Beautiful,” he breathed.

“I thought you’d appreciate it,” the General said, joining the priest. “Our greatest minds have studied these writings for over a thousand years. We still don’t fully understand them.”

Valdis paid no attention to the old man as he continued to run his hands up and down the stone wall.

“What does it say?” Jackie asked.

“It tells the history of the world,” Mary answered, her eyes darting back and forth between Valdis and the General. “First, the war in heaven, then the uprising led by the Morning Star, and finally his execution and the disappearance of the Sword of Fire.”

Jackie wrinkled her brow. “I thought angels became human when they needed to heal? Isn’t that the whole point? Why didn’t Lucifer just…you know…” She gestured at her body. “Get some flesh?”

The General shook his head, his single eye glued to Valdis as the priest continued to run his hands over the wall. “It wouldn’t have worked,” he said. “If an angel’s killed in the beyond it’s final. They can only join the path of the Apkallu if their injury isn’t serious enough to take their life. And besides, even were that not the case and they could incarnate after death, the execution of Lord Lucifer was before the Grigori learned the secret of creating Apkallu. When Gavri’el ended the life of the Morning Star it was permanent.”

“So you guys sit in these tunnels…what? Worshiping a dead angel?”

“So ignorant,” Mary sniffed. “You haven’t the slightest idea what’s going on, and you presume to tell us our lives are a waste? Do you have any idea what the Apkallu are planning? What they would do if the Order of Venus didn’t spend every free second trying to stop them? Why do you think Lucifer was trying to lead a rebellion in the first place?”

“You said it yourself, he wanted pow—”

“Here!” Valdis suddenly cried, pointing excitedly at a section of the wall. “I knew it looked familiar.” He stretched forward until his nose practically scraped the stone, motioning for Eli to bring the flashlight closer.

“What?” The General said, his rusty voice rising with excitement. “What did you find?”

Valdis motioned at the wall, directing the group’s attention to a small section toward the bottom. There, surrounded by lines of tightly packed script, was a large triangle vivisected by three smaller ones.

“I’ve seen that before,” Jackie said softly.

“Hunter Friskin’s sigil,” said Mary.

“This inscription has been a matter of debate for centuries,” The General spoke up. “None of our scholars are certain what it means.”

“That’s because they didn’t have my father,” Valdis said, smiling to himself.

Through the eye of memory he saw himself open the box, certain his father had left for the day. He had burned with curiosity as he threw open the lid that hot summer day. Inside had been a scroll of papyrus, ancient and close to falling apart. Valdis had removed it with care, noting how the timeworn strands rubbed his fingers, leaving bits of dust and whisper-thin fibers.

He had opened the scroll, naturally, never questioning whether it was safe, whether his father would know. S
o young
, Valdis remembered. Inside, he’d seen many things. One was the symbol which now drew his attention.

He traced his finger along its sharp edges and said with certainty, “A new Seraphim.”

“Impossible,” the General said immediately.

“Very funny,” said Mary.

Eli just laughed, his voice high and tinny in the long corridor.

Valdis ignored them and pointed to the first of the small triangles. “First choir.” Letting his finger fall to the next, “Second choir,” and finally, reaching the last, “Third choir. And connecting them all…Seraphim,” he jabbed his finger at the largest triangle that bisected the other three. “Created to rule all orders. Not of them, but
above
them.
Like I said—a new Seraphim.”

“There are only three,” Eli’s said, his laughter fading. “Lucifer, Michael and Gabriel. And only God can make a new angel.”

“Then I suggest you ask God,” Valdis stepped back from the wall. “Or whomever left these markings,” and in his mind, but unspoken:
And whomever left the same writing in Saint Catherine's.

Silence fell on the small group. The priest was proud, glowing with his discovery and pleased beyond measure to have succeeded where generations of linguists and historians had failed before him.

It was probably for that reason that Valdis missed seeing the shadows detach from the walls.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The first thing she thought was,
I found him
.

Immediately following was,
so have they
.

Karen watched from across the street as a group of stumbling students staggered toward the door of the industrial complex, banging loudly on the steel door. She’d been watching the same song and dance for the last twelve hours and knew the pattern well: the front screen of the entrance would slide open, the bouncer would ask a series of questions—Karen couldn’t hear them, but the answers had to be simple or the idiots would never make it through—and voila, admittance granted.

Simple, elegant in its way, and easy to fake. Case in point—the group of “stumbling students,” weren’t students at all. They were
Adonai
. Which meant Karen wasn’t the only one who’d tracked the Power.

She could make it in before the
Adonai
, that wasn’t the problem. Karen was tired, but her gift still had enough spark to get her through the door and into whatever lay beyond. The real problem was what she’d do once she made it inside.

Karen had spent the previous twenty-four hours circumventing the globe. By her tally she had crossed the myriad places of the Earth a thousand times. Her feet were very, very tired.

And in that time she had failed to find a single hair from Hunter Friskin.

Something was hiding him. Maybe it was the
Elohim
, maybe it was the
Adonai—
o
r maybe it was something else entirely.

Karen should have been able to close her eyes and point to Hunter. It took years for the connection between a newly christened Apkallu and the one who discovered him to wear off. The bond was more than physical; it was a spiritual umbilical cord designed by the Grigori to ensure the safety of the awakened angel. It was a dangerous world for one who possessed angelic gifts and didn’t know how to use them. An unfortunate example being the nurse Friskin had accidentally killed.

It should have been easier than this. Hash and Karen had both expected the Arch to find Friskin within a few hours. That was the simple part. Find Hunter, convince him to follow her to a safe house, rendezvous with Hash, and then plan their next move. She wasn’t sure what that would be, but hopefully Hash had come up with something by now. The Domination was a strategist of the highest order, able to predict the outcome of any battle to within ninety percent certainty. Karen didn’t exactly trust him—she had been on the other side of the
Elohim
for far too long—but if anyone could figure a way out of this mess, it was Hash.

She continued studying the entrance to the warehouse, the dry, dusty smell of the city stinging her nose. Karen had watched over a hundred different groups of people enter this building, almost all of which had been party goers—stumbling, vomiting, obnoxious youths looking for an excuse to grind on each other. That is, until one of her surveys around the world showed her someone else.

Karen had almost missed it. The two men had stood at the door to the building, older than the kids Karen had seen the last nine-hundred-and-ninety times she had crossed this way, but nothing unusual enough to catch her attention. At least, under normal circumstances. But she’d had a premonition that Hunter might have landed in Jerusalem, so she slowed down and took a second look. And that’s when she saw the card the two men flashed at the bouncer: a five-pointed star halved by a vertical line.

The Order of Venus.

It was supposed to be a legend, a myth created by Apkallu to scare acolytes. Karen remembered seeing the symbol of the alleged Order over a decade ago, when her mentor had first told her the story. A collection of humans who’d gathered the knowledge of the Apkallu into one place. Mortals who knew the history of the angels, who watched their battles from afar and made secret plans. The stuff of children’s stories.

But after the last two days Karen had come to believe in children’s tales. First the questions about Bath, then the discovery of the
agioi
at Saint Catherine's…her foundations were crumbling. If a Power could ignore a command from a superior, maybe the world wasn’t as solid as Karen had always thought. Maybe the Order was more than a rumor.

Things still didn’t add up, though. It would take more than a bunch of humans with knowledge of the Apkallu to hide Hunter. It would take someone from the first choir itself.

Karen thought back to Bath telling her to forget Friskin, to abandon him to the fate he had chosen. Completely out of character for the Cherubim. And if Hash was right, that the leaders of the
Elohim
and
Adonai
were in fact working together, hiding Hunter from Karen’s sight…

It was getting harder and harder to ignore the idea that Bath had betrayed them.

Karen grit her teeth and rose from her position.
Time to get off the pot
. She waited until the
Adonai
were almost through the entrance and blurred into motion
.