Aerie

CHAPTER FIVE

Aaron knew that time was of the essence and felt his patience stretched to its limits. The fallen angels, these citizens of Aerie, weren’t listening to him. He didn’t have time to be locked away in the playroom of some abandoned house. The Powers had Stevie, and the thought of his little brother still in the clutches of the murderous Verchiel acted like a key to unleash the power within him. Before he realized what he was doing, anger and guilt had unlocked the cage door, inviting the wild thing out to play. Aaron felt his transformation begin, and this time it hurt more than anything he could remember.

He turned to glare at Lehash, who still held his arm. “Let go of me,” he snarled, and felt a certain amount of satisfaction when the fallen angel did as he was told.

The pain was incredible, and Aaron could only guess it was because of the magickal restraints he still wore on his wrists and around his neck. He could feel the sigils burning upward from beneath his skin to decorate his flesh. They felt like small rodents with sharp, nasty claws, frantically digging to the surface. He screamed as sparks jumped from the golden manacles. The power within him wasn’t about to back down, even if it killed him.

He found Belphegor’s wide-eyed stare and held it with eyes as black as night. “Look at me!” Aaron cried. “Can’t you see that we’re telling the truth?”

He lurched toward the ancient fallen angel, crackling arcs of supernatural energy streaming from the enchanted restraints. From behind him he heard Camael and Gabriel call out for him to stop—but he couldn’t. He had to make Belphegor realize that they meant the people of Aerie no harm.

The constables were beside him. Lehash was aiming his guns, pulling back the golden hammers, while Lorelei had raised her hands and was mumbling something that sounded incredibly old. The one called Scholar stood at Belphegor’s side, ready to defend the wizened fallen angel if necessary.

“Give me the word, boss,” Lehash sneered, “and I’ll drop him where he stands.”

“No!” Belphegor ordered, raising his hand.

The sigils had finally burned their way to the surface of Aaron’s flesh, but there was no relief from the pain. His wings of ebony black had begun to expand on his back, but were hindered by the magick within the sparking bonds. The pain was just too much, and he fell to his knees upon the desiccated lawn in front of the abandoned home. “You’ve got to listen,” he moaned.

“Could just any Nephilim override the magicks of the manacles, Belphegor?” he heard Camael ask above the roar of anguish deafening his ears.

“He is powerful, I’ll grant him that,” Belphegor replied. “But I’ve met powerful halflings in my time, and that doesn’t make them prophets. Matter of fact, most are dead now, driven insane by power they couldn’t begin to understand, never mind tame.”

“And the markings?” Camael asked. “What do you make of them?”

Aaron opened his eyes to see the leader of Aerie kneeling beside him with Scholar. “I want to know what they mean,” Belphegor said, gesturing to the archaic symbols decorating the Nephilim’s face and arms. Scholar removed a pad of paper and pen from his back pocket and began to copy them.

“Do you believe me now?” Aaron asked weakly, exhausted from the battle between the angelic force and the magick within the golden restraints.

Belphegor stared at him with eyes ancient and inhuman, and he felt like some kind of new germ beneath a scientist’s microscope. “The question is, boy, do you believe that you are the Chosen?” Belphegor asked.

Aaron wanted to tell him what he wanted to hear, what would allow them their freedom, but he couldn’t. Although Camael and even the Archangel Gabriel believed he was the savior, the truth was, Aaron still saw himself as just a kid from Lynn, Massachusetts. Certainly he couldn’t deny his power, but did that make him the Chosen One?

I just don’t know.

“I … I’m not sure,” he told Belphegor, and felt the power begin to recede.

The old angel smiled and rose to his feet.

“Should we take them back to the house?” Lorelei asked. She had moved up behind the older angel, and Aaron noticed that her fingertips still crackled with the residual of her unused spell.

“I don’t think that will be necessary,” Belphegor replied. “Let them have the run of the place, but the manacles stay on until I’m sure they can be trusted.”

“Are you out of your mind, old man?” Lehash asked. The others looked uncomfortable with his outburst. “With so much going on out there, you’re gonna give them free reign? They’ll be murderin’ us in our sleep before—”

“You heard me, Lehash,” Belphegor said as he turned his back and strode through the yard. “Welcome to Aerie, folks,” he said, and disappeared around the corner of the abandoned house.

The prisoner’s eyes opened with a sound very much like late fall leaves crackling underfoot, head bent and gazing down upon hands charred and blackened. He was sitting up against the bars of his cage, his entire body enveloped in a cocoon of sheer agony. His fingers slowly straightened, and through scorched and bleary eyes, he watched as flakes of burnt flesh rained on his lap.

He wasn’t positive when Verchiel had left, but he was glad to see the Powers’ leader gone, for as bored as he was, imprisoned within the cage, he did not care for the angel’s company in the least. High maintenance that one, he thought, shifting his position in an attempt to get comfortable and accomplishing nothing more than additional waves of excruciating pain. Very temperamental.

The smell of overcooked meat wafted about the inside of the cage and the prisoner was reminded of a feast he had attended in a Serbian village not long before taking up residence in the Crna Reka Monastery. They had been celebrating the birth of a child, and had cooked a pig on a spit over a roaring fire. They had welcomed him to their celebration; a total stranger invited to partake of their happiness. So he did, and for a brief moment was able to forget all that he was, and the horrors for which he was responsible. Moments like that were few and far between in his interminable existence, and he held onto each like the most precious of jewels.

From the corner of his eye he spied movement, a tiny, dark shape scurrying along the wall toward the hanging cage. His friend the mouse had returned. The prisoner leaned back to see outside the cage, and some skin from his neck sloughed off between the bars to sprinkle the floor like black confetti. The air felt cool against his exposed flesh. He was healing, despite the hindering magicks in the metal of the cage.

“Hello,” he croaked, his voice little more than a dry whisper.

The mouse responded with a succession of tiny squeaks.

“I’m fine,” the prisoner answered. He leaned over until he was lying on his side and extended a blackened arm through the bars of the cage. The mouse began to squeak again, and he was touched by the tiny creature’s concern.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told the mouse. “Pain and I have a very unique relationship.”

The animal then sprung from the floor to land on the prisoner’s upturned hand and scrambled up the length of his arm into the cage.

“That’s it,” he cooed, still lying on his side, the mouse squatting before his face, nose, and whiskers twitching curiously.

“I’ll be fine, little one. A bit more time and I’ll be good as new.”

The mouse squeaked once and then again, tilting its head as it studied his condition.

“Yes, it hurts a great deal. But that’s all part of the game. It’s not as if I don’t deserve every teeth-gritting twitch of pain.”

The mouse squeaked, moving closer to his face. It nuzzled affectionately against the burned skin on his nose, gently rubbing it away to expose new flesh, pink and raw.

“No,” the prisoner said. “You just think I’m a good man; you didn’t know me before.”

Memories of times he’d rather have forgotten danced past the theater of his mind, and the prisoner struggled to right himself. His furry companion dug its claws into his shoulder and held on as he braced himself against the bars of the cage.

“What kind of man was I before? Do you really want to know?” he asked with a dry chuckle. The mouse began to clean itself, comfortably perched upon the prisoner’s shoulder.

“That’s a good idea,” he told his friend. “You’re going to feel pretty dirty when I’m done.”

The pain was no worse, and neither was it better, but this was old hat for him. He was a pro when it came to pain. It was always with him, whether his flesh was burned and blackened or he was sleeping peacefully on a woven mat in a Serbian monastery. It was his punishment, and he deserved it.

“You’ve got to promise that once you hear my story, you won’t leave me for some other fallen angel.”

The mouse gave him an encouraging squeak, and the prisoner’s breath rattled in his seared, fluid-filled lungs as he took a deep breath.

“It all started in Heaven,” he began, and the depth of his sorrow streamed from his mouth like blood from a mortal wound.

“So, where are all these citizens you guys keep talking about?” Aaron asked as they walked down the cracked and uneven sidewalk past one lifeless house after another.

“They’re around,” Lorelei answered with a flip of her snow-white locks. “After the business with that Johiel creep, I don’t think they’re too eager to roll out the red carpet for anybody new. I can’t believe he was going to sell us out just to save his own butt.” She shook her head in disgust as she crossed the street at a crosswalk. “Can’t trust anyone these days,” she said with a warning glance over her shoulder.

“How long has it been here?” Camael asked, scrutinizing the neighborhood with eyes more perceptive than a hawk’s.

“What?” the girl asked. “Aerie? I’ve been here six years, and this is the only place I’ve ever known. Although I hear it’s been in lots of different places: on the side of an active volcano, in an abandoned coal mine … one of the old-timers said he lived inside a sunken cruise ship at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Aerie seems to be wherever the citizens are.”

Camael nodded slowly. “That is why it was so difficult to find,” he said, his eyes still taking it all in. “It does not stay in one location.”

Gabriel was sniffing around the weather-beaten front steps of one of the abandoned homes; he sounded like the clicks of a Geiger counter searching for radiation. On a house in front of them, a large piece of plywood had been nailed across the entryway where the front door should have been. Crudely spray-painted on the wood were the words my family died for living here.

“What happened here?” Aaron asked, the message affecting him far more than he would have imagined. It was as if he could feel the grief streaming from each of the painted words as thoughts of his foster parents, their horrible demise, and his own home destroyed by flames flashed through his mind.

Lorelei stopped and looked at the house with him. “During the 1940s and 1950s this property was owned by ChemCord. They were producers of industrial pesticides, acids, organic solvents, and whatnot, and they used to dump their waste here.” She pointed to the street beneath her feet.

“The place stinks, Aaron,” Gabriel said as he relieved himself on the withered, brown remains of a bush in front of the house. “The dirt smells bad-like poison.”

“And that’s helping?” he asked the dog.

“Can’t hurt it,” Gabriel responded haughtily, and continued his exploration.

“He’s right, really,” Lorelei said. “They dumped excess chemicals and by-products in metal drums that they buried all over this property; tons and tons of the stuff.”

They continued to walk, each home taking on new meaning for Aaron. “Then how could they build houses—an entire neighborhood—here?” he asked.

“ChemCord went belly up in 1975 and they began to sell off their assets—including undeveloped land. As far as the guys at ChemCord were concerned, the property was perfectly safe.”

“There is much sadness here,” Camael said from behind them. They turned to see that he was staring at another of the homes. A rusted tricycle lay on its side in front, a kind of marker for the sorrow that emanated from each of the homes. “It has saturated these structures; I can see why Belphegor and the others would be drawn to it.”

“So let me guess,” Aaron began. “They built on the land and people started to get sick.”

Lorelei nodded. “They started construction of Ravenschild Estates in 1978, and the families began to move in during the spring of 1980. Everything was perfect bliss, until the first case of leukemia and then the second, and the third, and then came the birth defects.”

“How many people died?” Aaron asked. The wind blew down the deserted street kicking up dust, and he could have sworn he heard the faint cries of the mournful in the breeze.

“I’m really not sure,” the woman answered. “I know a lot of kids got sick before the state got involved in 1989. They investigated and forced the families to evacuate. They ended up purchasing more than three hundred and fifty homes and financing some of the relocation costs.”

“So it’s kind of like a ghost town,” Aaron said, still listening to the haunted cries upon the wind.

“Yeah, it is,” Lorelei answered.

“What did your friend Lehash call this place?” he asked, his nose wrinkled with displeasure. “A little piece of paradise? I’m not seeing that at all.”

Lorelei looked about, a dreamy expression on her pale, attractive features. “It may not look like much,” she said quietly, “but it’s lots better than what I left behind. I’ll take this over the nuthouse any day of the week.” She abruptly turned and continued on her way.

Her words piqued Aaron’s curiosity, and he sped up to walk beside her. “Did you say you were in a nuthouse?”

Lorelei didn’t answer right away, as if she were deciding whether or not she wanted to talk about it. “A pretty good one too—or so I’ve been told,” she finally said. “I was seventeen, on the verge of my eighteenth birthday, and everything I’d ever known turned to shit.”

Aaron could hear the pain in her voice and immediately sympathized. He understood exactly what she was talking about. “It was the … the power inside you… the whole Nephilim thing.”

She nodded. “I didn’t know it then, but I finally figured it out after one of my last hospital stays. I was on the streets and had stopped taking my medications and things started to become clearer. ‘Course that’s what crazy people not taking their medicines always say.” She laughed, but it was a laugh filled with bitterness.

Aaron suddenly saw in the young woman a kindred spirit and wondered if her story would have been his if not for the whole prophecy thing.

“I was drawn to this place,” Lorelei continued. “As the drugs that I’d been pumped full of left my system I could feel the pull of Aerie—I was seeing it in my dreams, along with all kinds of other nonsense that I’m sure you’re familiar with.”

“Were there those that attempted to harm you?” Camael chimed in, making reference to the Powers. “Trying to keep you from reaching this destination?”

A lock of white hair drifted in front of her face, and she swept it away with the back of her hand. “I got really good at avoiding them.” She turned to the angel. “At first I thought they were just manifestations of my paranoid delusions, but when one tried to burn me alive inside an old tenement house I was crashing in, I realized that wasn’t the case.”

“You were lucky to have survived.”

Lorelei agreed. “I think that the power inside was helping me. Without the drugs, it was growing and helping me to find a place where I could be safe.”

They passed an enormous mound of burned and blackened wood that had been piled in the center of the street. Aaron could see that some doors and windows, railings and banisters from some of the houses had made it onto the stack. He looked from the charred pyre to her.

“We had problems with some local kids,” she explained. “Liked to use the place to party. We were afraid their little bonfires would eventually burn it down.”

“What did you do?” Aaron asked.

Lorelei extended her hands and small sparks of radiant energy danced from one fingertip to the next. “After I finally got here and realized I wasn’t crazy, that I was Nephilim, I learned that I had an affinity for angel magick. My father and I did some spells to scare the kids away. This place has a real reputation now, even worse than it had before.”

“Your father? Who?…”

“Lehash,” she answered. “Pretty cool, huh? Not only was I not insane, but I hooked up with my dad the angel, and suddenly everything began to make a weird kind of sense.”

The words of the Archangel Gabriel echoed through Aaron’s mind—You have your father’s eyes—and Aaron wondered if the mystery of his own parentage would ever be revealed to him.

On a tiny side street they stopped in front of a house with powder blue aluminum siding, strings of Christmas lights still dangling from the gutters.

“Is that my car?” Aaron asked, moving past Lorelei toward the vehicle parked in front.

Gabriel beat him there and gave the vehicle the once over. “It’s our car, Aaron,” he said, tail wagging. “I can smell our stuff.”

“One of the citizens retrieved it from the Burger King parking lot.” Lorelei gestured toward the house. “This is where you’ll be staying.”

Aaron gave the house another look and felt his aggravation level rise. He didn’t want to stay; he wanted to continue the search for his brother. They had done nothing wrong, and Belphegor had no right to keep them here. “How long are you planning to hold us?” he asked, staring down in growing anger at the manacles fastened around his wrist. “If I’m ever going to find my brother—”

“You’ll stay as long as the Founder says you’ll stay,” Lorelei interrupted, crossing her arms in defiance. “As far as we’re concerned, you’re the ones responsible for all the killings. And, until we know otherwise, you’re not going anywhere.”

“That’s crap and you know it,” he growled, the angelic presence perking up within him. It would never miss an opportunity for conflict and he had to steel himself against the urge to let it free. He had no desire to feel the effects of the manacles’ magicks again.

“If my father had his way,” she interjected, “you’d still be locked in that basement, Chosen One or otherwise.” Lorelei took a step closer, fists clenched by her side. “What makes you think you’re so damn special anyway?” she demanded.

“I didn’t ask for this!” Aaron pushed past the woman, heading in the opposite direction.

“Where are you going?”

He stopped, but didn’t turn around. “I need to take a walk. Besides, Gabriel is hungry and I wouldn’t mind a bite to eat myself. Is there anyplace around here where we can get some food?”

Lorelei didn’t answer right away, as if she were considering not letting him go. Aaron decided that would be a very bad idea on her part, for his angelic nature was already coiled and ready to strike. Looking for trouble.

“You’re heading in the right direction,” she finally said. “Take a left onto Gagnon. You’ll see the community center at the end of the street. Should be able to get a sandwich or something there.”

“Thanks,” he said, starting to walk again. Gabriel followed close at his side, but Camael remained with Lorelei. “I’ll see you guys later.”

“Yeah,” Lorelei called after him. “You will, and as soon as you get used to the idea, things’ll be a little easier for you.”