Walking In the Midst of Fire

CHAPTER TEN England 1349

Pope Tyranus’ carriage followed the line of soldiers sworn to defend the holy man and his mission at any cost.

Remiel sat across from the Pope, the wings that he had yet to summon itching beneath the guise of humanity he wore, eager to perform the task that had been requested of him.

He could have flown to their destination on his own, but Tyranus required his company on the ride. The angel had no choice but to obey.

“Tell me,” the Pope began, pulling aside a red velvet curtain to gaze out upon the bleak, English countryside. The weather was foul, as it had been for days, as if in anticipation of the conflict against the forces of darkness to come. “Tell me why you walk the earth.”

Remiel did not wish to speak of it, but the words came nonetheless.

“There is a simplicity here that speaks to me,” he said.

Tyranus chuckled. “Where you see simplicity, I see the complexities of this world . . . complexities that I must master.”

Remiel remained silent, hoping no more questions would come, but knowing better.

“How could you leave your God?” the old man asked. “For is He not your everything? Your sole reason for existing to answer His every whim?”

“It was.”

The images came again, the war and the killing of his brethren.

The death of so much more.

“There came a time when I could be there no more,” Remiel offered. “When the difficulties of Heaven weighed far too heavily upon my winged shoulders.”

Pope Tyranus studied the angel, his head resting against the back of the red velvet seat.

“Where is the difficulty in serving your master?” the Pope finally asked. “If there is trust in Him, there should be no question.”

Remiel saw the deaths of those he had once loved, those corrupted by the message of the Morningstar. He had hoped there would be another answer, that the Lord God Almighty would find a solution other than war.

But Remiel had been forced to take a side, and the solution was death to those who fought against His holy word.

“There was trust . . . ,” Remiel said softly. “For a time.”

This response seemed to rankle the holy man. “Are you saying that the Almighty is not to be trusted?”

“I’m saying that my trust in Him was tested,” Remiel explained. “And it was a test that I failed.”

The coach came to a sudden, lurching stop, leaning precariously to one side. Outside, Remiel could hear the chatter of the soldiers and the cries of horses in distress.

“What is happening?” the Pope asked, a slight tinge of fear evident in his voice.

Remiel cautiously opened the coach door, to be certain that they were not under attack. They were not, but somehow the soldiers had marched themselves deep into the center of a marsh, thick fog closing in on them from every direction. Several soldiers were attempting to lead their horses to solid footing, but to no avail, the panicked beasts’ cries echoing strangely across the misty moor.

“What is it? What’s happening?” Pope Tyranus demanded to know.

“Stay here,” Remiel ordered, leaping down to the muddy ground, slamming the carriage door closed behind him.

“Captain of the guard!” Remiel cried, feeling the earth suck at his boots, trying to lock him in place.

The sounds of the panicked horses, mingled with the screams of soldiers who had wandered into the bogs were eerily disturbing.

Remiel caught sight of the captain standing, holding tightly to his horse’s reins, staring out into the shifting mists.

“Captain,” he yelled, grabbing the man by the shoulder and spinning him around.

The man looked at him, eyes bulging with fear.

“How could you have led us into . . . ,” Remiel began to ask.

“We weren’t anywhere near a marsh,” the captain cried, shaking his head from side to side as his voice quaked with emotion. “A mist blew out onto the road, a mist so thick that . . .”

He stopped speaking and slowly turned back to the nightmarish scene as the wetlands claimed even more of the soldiers.

“And then we were here,” the captain finished. “May the Lord God Almighty preserve us, we were here.”

The captain let go of his horse’s reins, and the animal galloped madly off into the marsh. For a moment, Remiel lost sight of the animal in a writhing gray cloud, but then the cloud shifted; even the angel wasn’t sure of what he was seeing.

The captain’s horse was struggling mightily in the mire, which appeared to be hungry. When it seemed that the muscular beast would manage to free itself, something Remiel could not quite discern in the haze reached up from the water and mud to drag it back from whence it had escaped.

The Seraphim glanced toward the captain and realized he was no longer beside him. Remiel saw him wandering off in another direction, as if answering some siren call.

It was then that the angel sensed it. It had been hidden at first, mingling with the damp, heady smell of the marshlands, but the angel found it as the screams of animal and man intensified, and the shapes of things that might have once been human pulled themselves up from the clutches of the moors to shamble through the fog.

It was the scent of dark magick.

Remiel reached beneath his robes for the sword that hung there, the blade immediately igniting as it became engorged with the fire of the divine.

The light of the blade cut through the unnatural shadows and shifting mist, illuminating the horrors that were making their way directly toward him.

“What is the meaning of this?” Pope Tyranus cried out, clambering out of the carriage onto the moist ground. “I do not care to be kept waiting!”

It took a moment, but the Pope finally saw what was illuminated in the light of the angel’s sword.

“What in the name of all that is holy?” he stated, staring numbly ahead at the sight of the men, women, and children that had been sacrificed to the bogs so many years ago, their strangely preserved bodies . . .

Now returned to ghastly life.

It didn’t take Remy long to find Neal’s address, seeing as there was only one employee with that first name working at the Elite Limousine Company out of Warwick, Rhode Island. Doubting that they’d be willing to hand out personal information over the phone, Remy had paid a visit to the office.

It was quiet at Elite that morning, and willing himself unseen, Remy had whispered in the office manager, Ginny’s, ear that things were incredibly slow, and maybe she should go grab herself a coffee over at the Dunkin Donuts down the street to keep herself awake.

Ginny had heeded his suggestion, leaving him with access to the company’s files, where, after a little searching, he found the address of one Neal Moreland of Providence.

Seeing as the Mercedes that he’d borrowed from Aszrus’ garage had a GPS, it didn’t take long at all to find the driver’s residence in downtown Providence. Remy parked the car as close to the old apartment building on Pequot Street as he could, and walked around to the back of the building. There was a back door, and Remy quietly climbed the six steps up to it, peering in through the curtained window to see an entryway, and a back flight of stairs leading to the apartments above. He took a brief look around to see whether anybody was watching before unfurling his wings. He quickly wrapped himself in their embrace, and thinking about the hallway on the other side of the door, suddenly appeared there. According to Elite’s schedule book, Neal had had a late-night international pick-up at Logan last night and was supposed to be driving somebody back to the Boston airport later that afternoon, so this would probably be an awesome time to catch him. Remy slowly climbed the steps up to the second floor, and was making his way to the third when he felt it.

It was like walking into a curtain of spiderwebs, a strange tickling sensation across his bare skin alerting him that something of an unearthly nature had recently manifested itself in the area. He immediately went on guard, focusing his preternatural senses on his surroundings.

The wood creaked as he stepped onto the third-floor landing. A short hallway was before him, Neal’s apartment at the end.

Remy listened carefully to the sounds of the old building, hearing only the creaks of centuries-old wood, the distinct hum of multiple refrigerators, and in one apartment, the contented purr of a cat. Attuning his hearing to the apartment he wanted, Remy didn’t hear any signs of life, and was fearful that Neal had already left for the day.

Standing in front of the driver’s door, Remy was about to knock, just to be sure, when . . .

“He ain’t home,” said a voice from behind him, nearly causing him to explode out of his skin.

It took a second or two to realize that he knew that voice.

Remy turned to see Francis leaning against the wall behind him.

“Where the hell were you hiding?” Remy asked, annoyed, but also glad to see his friend. A second set of hands was always helpful.

“I’ve been right here all along,” the balding assassin said. “Guess those ninja correspondence courses were da bomb.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Working,” Francis said, pushing off the wall to approach the door. “But the person I was sent to check on isn’t home.”

“Huh,” Remy said, interested in the fact that they seemed to be here to see the same person. “And you’ve been sent here to see this person by your current employer?”

“I was.”

“This has the potential to be very bad,” Remy said to his friend.

He assumed that his friend’s mysterious new employer was Lucifer Morningstar, although Francis had never actually confirmed that.

“Care to share?” Francis asked, his eyes a cold and piercing gray behind his dark-framed glasses.

Remy wasn’t sure how much to say, for if Montagin’s suspicions about the legions of the Morningstar being responsible for Aszrus’ murder were correct, then this could very well blow up in his face, and spread exponentially from there.

“Let’s just say that I’m working on a potentially explosive case, and wanted to talk to the individual who lives in this apartment.”

Francis stroked his chin with a long-fingered hand. “A potentially explosive case,” he repeated. “And it just so happens to be somebody that I’m checking up on as well. What are the odds of that?”

“Those are some pretty crazy odds,” Remy agreed with a slow nod.

“Aren’t they?” Francis replied.

His friend had already turned to the door, and was reaching inside his pocket for the knife that had once belonged to one of Heaven’s most powerful angels. Francis had learned that he had been manipulated by this angel, part of his memory cut away by the very blade he now had in his possession.

Francis had killed that angel for the indignity, and for his troubles, had kept the knife.

He inserted the ultrathin blade into the lock on the door, and slowly turned it. The door swung open.

“Would you look at that?” Francis exclaimed. “It’s unlocked.”

“Imagine that,” Remy said, following the former Guardian angel inside.

The door opened into a small kitchen. They both looked around.

“See anything?” Francis asked.

The apartment was relatively tidy, all things considered, and Remy didn’t see anything that set off any alarm bells. Silently, he walked toward the living area, focusing on a tiny desk against the wall and the laptop that was resting there.

“Well, since you’re not being all that forthcoming, let me start,” Francis said. He was in front of the refrigerator, examining some notes held in place by magnets.

“Neal Moreland is doing some work for my employer.”

Remy quickly turned his gaze to his friend.

“A limousine driver from Providence, Rhode Island, is working for Lucifer Morningstar?”

Francis glanced at Remy, then back to the fridge.

“I never said who my employer was.” There was a hint of coldness in his tone.

“Cut the shit, Francis. I know,” Remy said. He was poking around the desk, careful to not mess anything up.

“How?”

“People usually don’t come back in one piece when the Hell dimension they’re trapped in is completely reconfigured by the most powerful fallen angel to exist. In fact, they usually don’t come back at all.”

“I’m lucky like that,” Francis said. He was now looking through the fridge, and was about to drink from a carton of orange juice.

“And you have the pistol,” Remy told him, remembering the case he’d taken not long after Madeline’s death that involved the Pitiless weapons. One of the Pitiless had been a Colt Peacemaker, a weapon that never missed its target.

A weapon that had been forged from the power of the Morningstar. A weapon that Francis now held in his possession.

Francis wiped his chin of orange juice, and carefully placed the carton back on the shelf in the fridge. “I know how you are about this shit which is why I kept it to myself,” he said as he joined Remy in the living room.

Remy didn’t care for secrets, no matter how badly they were kept, especially when they had something to do with an opposing force of Heaven.

“So, does this make us mortal enemies or something?” Francis asked.

“All depends on whether what you’re doing here has anything to do with starting a war.”

Francis stepped back, and made a face. “You’ve lost me.”

Remy stared at him, attempting to read his friend.

“Seriously.” Francis put up his hands in mock surrender. “I haven’t a fucking clue what you’re talking about. This face wouldn’t lie,” he added.

No matter what else happened between them, Remy trusted Francis not to lie to him, and if he said he didn’t know anything about a plan to start the war machine rolling, he believed him.

“Why don’t you start by telling me what Neal was doing for your boss? Then I’ll see if I can fill in the blanks from there.”

“I’m only agreeing to this because you’re my friend, and I hated to keep that shit about my employer secret,” Francis said.

Remy couldn’t help but think of the secret he had yet to share with Francis: his involvement with the woman with whom Francis had at one time been obsessed.

But there was a time and a place for everything, and this was neither for that.

“Neal is a driver with a local car service,” Francis began. “And one of his clients—”

“Is General Aszrus,” Remy stated flatly.

“Bingo,” Francis said, pointing at him. “So, Neal drives for the general, they chat a bit on the way to wherever it is they’re going, and when Neal drops off his customer, he makes a little call.”

“Neal was an informant?” Remy asked.

Francis nodded. “Yeah, kept the big boss in the loop as to how one of Heaven’s generals was spending his downtime.”

“I don’t suppose the big boss knows anything about the latest piece of hot information?” Remy said.

“And what might that be?”

“Aszrus is dead. Somebody cut his heart out.”

Remy was good at reading reactions, and Francis’ was most definitely genuine.

“Get the fuck outta here,” he exclaimed. “Who . . . ?”

“What I’m trying to find out,” Remy answered.

“If Aszrus is dead, how come the sky isn’t filled with angels with swords and hard-ons for fighting for the glory of whoever’s fucking side they’re on?”

“Because nobody knows.”

“You’re shitting me,” Francis said. “Damn, got any other secrets you’re sitting on?”

Remy kept himself from flinching at the question. There was a time and place.

“I’ve managed to keep the information locked up for now, but I don’t know how much longer we have. Montagin is babysitting the corpse with the help of a Vatican magick user by the name of Malatesta.”

“Montagin,” Francis said with a sneer. “I’m surprised he hasn’t sent out a mass e-mail yet.”

“You might be surprised,” Remy said. “He seems just as concerned as I am about the potential for some really nasty shit to go down if this information gets out before we can figure out who’s responsible.”

“So you think driver Neal might have something?”

“It’s all I’ve got right now,” Remy said. “If he could at least tell us where he took Aszrus last, we might be able to move backward from there.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Francis agreed. “Why don’t we go grab a coffee and wait to see if . . .”

A heavyset man, his arms full of groceries, was standing just inside the door, staring at the two men in the living room.

“Does Neal know you’re in here?” he asked, shifting the plastic shopping bags.

Remy took a step forward, but Francis took point.

“Yeah, he left the door open for us,” Francis said with an enormous smile. “We’re supposed to be meeting for lunch. I’m surprised he’s not here yet.”

“Are you sure it’s today?” the man asked.

“Yeah, I just talked to him this morning,” Remy said, taking out his phone.

“Well he must’ve forgot,” the big guy said, already losing interest in them. “’Cause I just saw him getting into his car. If you bust a hump, maybe you can catch him.”

Remy looked at Francis, and he at him.

“Son of a . . . ,” Remy began, darting across the kitchen to the window. He looked through the filthy glass onto a rusty fire escape and the alley below, where he saw a navy blue Town Car start to pull away.

“It’s him,” Remy said, pulling open the window and climbing out onto the fire escape.

He wasn’t about to let this guy get away.

Remy was starting down the metal stairs, not wanting to risk releasing his wings and being seen, when something fell past the fire escape at great speed. It landed in front of the Town Car only to be struck by the vehicle. He heard the sounds of twisting metal and breaking glass.

Remy leapt down the final stretch of stairs to the alley just in time to see Francis peeling himself from the front of the smashed Town Car bumper, a geyser of steam from the ruptured radiator hissing like the king of all serpents.

“No need to thank me,” Francis said, checking his suit jacket for rips. “I do this shit all the time.”

The driver’s side door opened with a screech.

“What the fuck!” Neal Moreland bellowed as he crawled out from behind the inflated airbag. “Look what you fucking did to my car!”

Remy was suddenly beside the guy, taking his arm in a steely grip.

“You were in quite the hurry, Neal,” he said. “Late for a pick-up?”

Francis stepped around the car, brushing pieces of glass from the fabric of his jacket.

“Who the hell are you two supposed to be?” the man asked defiantly, trying to pull away from Remy’s hold with little success.

Neal was older than he first looked. His thick head of hair was dyed an inky black and too many trips to the tanning salon had left his skin lined and leathery.

“Management sent me,” Francis stated flatly, his gaze boring into the driver’s. “Do you understand?”

Neal quit struggling, knowing exactly what Francis meant.

“Yeah, sure,” he said quickly. “Why the fuck did you have to wreck my car?”

“Because we wouldn’t have been able to talk with you if we hadn’t,” Remy explained.

Neal looked at him. “I got a call saying that I pissed somebody off with my job last night,” he said. “Said I might want to lay low for a while.”

“Your job last night is exactly what I’d like to discuss,” Remy told him, pulling him back toward the fire escape.

“Hey, I can’t help if he never came out,” Neal protested as Remy began to push him toward the first step. “I waited until they told me not to.”

“Who told you?” Francis asked.

“A guy came out and said Mr. Aszrus would be finding another way home.”

“Where did you take him?” Remy asked.

“Where he told me to go,” Neal said.

He looked as though he was going to say more, but stopped, staring at something in the opposite direction.

“Now what the fuck is that?” he asked.

Remy barely had a chance to look when the driver was snatched away. Francis and Remy reacted as one, jumping aside as the tendril of smoke dragged a flailing Neal Moreland up into a roiling black cloud that was drifting in from the opposite end of the alley.

Remy and Francis knew that it wasn’t really a cloud at all.

Neal screamed horribly as he was taken inside the billowing substance, and a rainfall of blood began pattering down atop the roof of the limousine and the alley floor.

“Black Choir,” Remy announced, already flexing the muscles of his shoulders to make his wings emerge.

“No shit,” Francis said, drawing the golden Colt from inside his suit jacket, already on the move toward the threat.

The Black Choir was the most horrible example of the fallout from the war in Heaven: angels who chose not to take a stand during the Great War, cursed to be accepted by neither God nor Lucifer, and warped to monstrous proportions by their inability to take a side.

They were true abominations, their misery provoking their foul deeds.

Remy searched the alley for something to use as a weapon, finding a length of an old wooden pallet lying up against the side of the apartment building beside the Dumpster. It would have to do.

He reached for the piece of wood in midstride, his wings lifting him from the ground as he took flight.

The Choir’s writhing, cloudlike environment descended toward Francis, who opened fire with the Pitiless pistol. Shrieks of the eternally damned echoed from within the shifting black and gray miasma. The cloud expanded, flowing out from the ground. Francis spun, attempting to outrun the roiling storm, but he wasn’t fast enough, turning to fire into the black cloud even as it engulfed him.

Remy descended from above, the piece of wood in his clutches now burning with the fires of Heaven. He could see glimpses of shapes within the shifting fog, the accursed angels now neither damned, nor divine. They were a horrible sight to behold, their thin, pale bodies warped by the hatred they felt for God and His opposite.

He dropped within the cloud, lashing out with the burning board, the fires of Heaven illuminating the numbing atmosphere within. He swung the flaming club, striking at the Choir and driving them away from his friend.

Francis fired the pistol with deadly accuracy.

It was like a world unto itself within the cloud—a horrible world of misery and torment—and Remy and Francis fought together to be free of it.

“Get me the fuck out of here, Chandler,” Francis cried out.

“I’m working on it,” Remy shouted, swinging his makeshift weapon at his foes, while also attempting to illuminate a path to escape. Briefly he caught a glimpse of the smashed-in Town Car, and flapped his wings, flying toward it. “Follow me,” he ordered, swinging his burning weapon at the withered angels who tried to prevent their leave.

Francis’ gun boomed, and angels fell, as they fought their way toward freedom.

“Get out,” Remy told Francis, pushing him out of the shifting cloud and back into the alley.

“What about you?” Francis asked as he fired his weapon three more times in succession, the screams of the damned nearly deafening in response.

“I’m right behind you,” Remy said, infusing the piece of pallet with even more divine fire than it could contain, and tossing it toward the Black Choir angels who were slithering closer to them through their misty environment.

The wood exploded as it fell among them, the Choir screaming out in rage and pain, driven deeper into the cloud by the blinding light of Heaven.

Remy emerged to find Francis standing at the ready, gun in hand.

The living darkness of the Black Choir writhed and shifted before them. Something darker than the area surrounding it moved within, and the Seraphim was at the ready, wings spread to propel him into action.

The body of Neal Moreland was ejected from the cloud, spit out like an old piece of gum to land broken and bloody beside his wrecked limousine. Seemingly having accomplished what it had come to do, the Black Choir drifted back and away, disappearing as quickly as it had appeared.

“Son of a bitch,” Remy hissed, pulling the aspects of his true nature back within himself and squatting beside Neal’s corpse.

The driver’s body was withered and pale, as if drained of life energies as well as fluids. It was a horrible way to go.

“So much for answers,” Remy said.

“We might be able to get some more,” Francis said, putting the Pitiless back inside his jacket.

“What do you mean?” Remy asked.

Francis knelt down beside the corpse, and from another inside pocket extracted the special knife. “This thing is better than a Swiss Army knife,” the former Guardian angel said as he plunged the glowing blade into the back of Neal’s head. “Let’s see what I can find.”

Francis seemed to drift off for a moment, staring blankly into space.

A smile suddenly appeared on his face.

“What is it?” Remy asked.

“Yahtzee.”