In the House of the Wicked

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Like a faithful dog, the power of the divine was coming back to him.

Deacon could not help but smile as he was filled again with the energy Stearns had so desperately coveted. He held Stearns tightly by the shoulders, watching as the divine force the sorcerer had tried to rip from him flowed back into his own body.

He allowed wings of flame to unfurl, reveling in the rush of cosmic energies that made him feel like the next-best thing to the Creator Himself.

“What was that, Algernon?” Deacon asked the man who had started to wither and age in his grasp. “What was that about taking away what’s mine?”

“Please,” Stearns gasped as a bloody tooth fell from blackened gums to dribble on a string of spit to the floor. “Leave me with something…just a taste.”

Deacon threw his head back and laughed, catching sight of the rip in the fabric of reality swirling above his head. Is that getting larger? he wondered offhandedly.

“I gave the power to you, Algernon.” Deacon turned his attention back to what was left of the sorcerer. “A gift…but you were too weak to contain it.”

“Please,” the old man begged, the flesh on his face sagging.

Deacon had never felt so strong.

“Please?” Deacon repeated, giving the man a violent shake. “If I had begged for my wife’s life…or mercy for my little boy, would you and your cabal have granted it?”

Stearns looked away, his eyes closing.

“I thought not,” Deacon said. “All those years I spent in the shadow place…all those lonely, lonely years…it led me here…led me to this very special moment.” He gave Stearns another shake.

“Do you hear me…old man?” he asked with joy.

Stearns’ eyes flickered open, hooded at first but growing wider by the second.

“Yes, that’s it,” Deacon urged. “Wake up for me…wake up for that special moment when I take it all from you.”

He was about to flex the full extent of his power, to allow the fires of the Seraphim to surge through his body, down into his hands, to incinerate the sorcerer to cinder and ash. Until he realized that Stearns’ milky gaze was focused not on him, but on something somewhere beyond him.

And his mortal enemy was smiling.

Deacon began to turn but was not fast enough.

Two daggers of metal entered the resurrected flesh of his back, just below his beautiful wings of fire.

There was a whisper in his ear.

“I believe you have something that belongs to me.”

And the fires of the Seraphim surged to greet Remy Chandler.

The power of Heaven flowed through Remy’s hands as he gripped the hilts of the murderous blades.

He screamed as the power entered him, its home for countless centuries.

But its dwelling had changed, and the divine fire of Heaven wondered if this receptacle for its glory would be strong enough to contain it.

Remy sensed its hesitation and urged it forward, even though his body burned with its heat and the scent of his singed flesh filled the air.

“Come into me,” Remy cried out, his voice rough and choked with smoke. “Come into me and be at home.”

And the power did, rushing in to fill the void that had been left by its passing.

Filling Remy close to bursting.

Deacon felt his body grow weaker.

The muscles in his back shriveled and he slid off the dagger’s blades, dropping to his knees on the broken ground. Then he pitched forward, lying on his belly, desperately holding on to what little life energies he had remaining, and was shocked to find himself staring into the equally desiccated face of his rival.

Deacon did not know if his adversary was dead or alive until he saw the sorcerer’s shoulder twitch and his arm begin to move. Fingers splayed, Stearns weakly extended his arm, reaching for Deacon.

Reaching for his face.

Too weak to move, Deacon could only watch in horror as his enemy’s hand grew closer, horrible puckered mouths, like multiple versions of his grandfather’s toothless mouth, hungrily descending.

Deacon wanted to scream but he did not have it within him to do so.

Stearns’ hand fell upon him and the mouths greedily began to feed on what precious little he had left.

And suddenly Deacon found himself transported to another place.

It took him but a second to realize when and where he was.

It was August 6, 1945, and he was standing in the center of a road that led to Hiroshima.

He looked up to the sky, closing his eyes, waiting.

There came a flash so bright that he could see it, even though his eyes were still closed.

And a sound followed that could have been the sound of Creation.

But he knew, in fact, it was the sound of the end.

Remy felt as though he’d been born again.

The Seraphim was whole once more- he was whole once more.

But something was wrong.

Remy’s body swelled with power, his every muscle burning, throwing off waves of intense heat. He tried to rein it in, to calm its fury, but something stirred it to action, and suddenly he knew the cause.

The golem child-Angelina-had filled him with the power of life, and this was what the holy fire was feeding on. The fires were stoked too high.

The sustenance of life was the most splendid and delicious of energies, and he was drunk on its potential. Remy struggled to focus, but he was high on the power that coursed through him.

He needed to do something, to find a way to alleviate this dangerous overflow. His gaze moved across the blighted rooftop before him, falling on the most horrific of sights.

The nearly skeletal Algernon Stearns lay atop the body of Konrad Deacon, feeding on what residual life force still remained within his enemy’s withered corpse.

As if sensing the power in Remy’s stare, Stearns raised his gaze to him.

There was hunger in the old sorcerer’s eyes.

And this time, Remy was happy to oblige him.

He surged upward with a single flap of his powerful wings, dropping down in front of the cadaverous figure. Fear had momentarily surpassed hunger as Stearns looked at him, but that was quickly dispersed as Remy moved closer and extended his hand.

It was like dangling a bloody piece of meat before a hungry dog. At first there was some wariness, and then all sense of caution was jettisoned as the hunger got the better of him and Stearns reached up, wrapping his fingers around Remy’s hand.

The sensation was nauseating, and Remy had to make a conscious effort not to yank his hand away in utter disgust. He could feel the mouths moving against his flesh, sucking away the excessive energies that threatened to overtake him. The intensity of the power that rushed through his body was beginning to diminish, and he could at last begin to focus.

Finally feeling a sense of calm, a sense of peace, Remy tried to take his hand away from the energy vampire, but was met with considerable resistance, the eager mouths on Stearns’ hands sucking all the faster, attempting to take even more than what was being offered.

It was exactly what Remy would have expected from such a creature, and why he had decided to do what he was about to.

Stearns brought his other hand around for even more of the angel’s power, but Remy was faster, snatching the sorcerer’s wrist before he could take hold.

The sorcerer grew frantic, desperate to partake of that much more of the Seraphim’s precious life energies.

But Remy had decided that he had had enough.

Stearns must have seen something in Remy’s eyes, something that told him that he had fed for the last time. In a last-ditch effort, magick exploded from his fingertips, bolts of crisscrossing energy causing the ground before him to detonate explosively as he attempted to flee.

But the Seraphim was not hindered by the magickal display, soaring up and over the mystical conflagration to descend behind the sorcerer.

“Please,” was the last word to escape his mouth, as Remy reached out for him. He grabbed Stearns by the head, and violently snapped his neck like a dry twig.

Remy felt little remorse for the magick user as he released his twitching body, letting it drop limply to the broken ground. There were other, more pressing matters that required his-

“Remy?”

He heard his name carried across the rooftop and turned, in all his angelic glory, toward the sound. He was stunned by what he saw.

At first he thought it some kind of trick, some last bit of magickal mischief perpetrated by the sorcerers that had turned his life around of late, but soon came to realize that she was real.

Ashley.

He was overjoyed to see her and about to approach when he saw the expression on her face.

How long has she been standing there? What did she see me do?

It was an expression of fear.

Thomas E. Sniegoski

In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel