Where Angels Fear to Tread

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Remy sat in the back of the black SUV as it sped down the dark West Virginia road.

“We’re close,” Deryn said from the front seat, between Mathias, who was driving, and Delilah. “We’re really, really close.”

Delilah placed a comforting arm around the mother, pulling her close. “And soon you’ll be holding your little girl in your arms again,” she said, leaning her head against Deryn’s. “And I will be holding mine.”

Remy’s ears perked up, and he was about to ask what she had meant by that, when the first of the attackers spilled from the woods down onto the road. They came from both sides, many of them wearing dark clothing, their screaming faces seeming to float in the stygian darkness as they jumped into the path of the speeding vehicle.

Mathias barely slowed as he plowed into the first of the fleshy obstacles.

Tires screeched, and the windshield turned to a frosted red, ice tinged with crimson, before the air bag erupted from the steering column. The sound of impact was horrible; the screams of those hit even worse.

Deryn was screaming too as the car spun and came to a neck-snapping stop.

“Deal with this,” Delilah ordered her driver, before turning in her seat to look at Remy and at those beside him.

Without question, they all left the car.

Remy was torn as he heard the sounds of fighting from outside.

“Go, angel,” she told him, her arms still around his crying client. “They need you out there. She’ll be perfectly safe with me.”

Remy hesitated until the first blast of gunfire.

“Go,” Delilah hissed, her eyes glistening in the darkness of the car.

He pushed open the car door. It was chaos outside, Samson’s children and Delilah’s soulless warriors fighting together against a common foe.

A woman wearing a hooded sweatshirt and torn sweatpants came at him with a kitchen knife. She screamed something unintelligible, thrusting the blade toward him. Remy moved aside, grabbing hold of her arm and twisting it enough so that she dropped the blade.

“Fucking bastard!” she got out between screams of pain.

But that didn’t stop her; she continued to fight, clawing at his face in her frenzy.

He hated to do it, but he punched her, and blood sprayed from her nose as she at last dropped to her knees and fell sideways to the ground.

“Nice one,” he heard a voice say, and he glanced over to see Marko grinning, just before Remy delivered a roundhouse kick to an attacker wielding a baseball bat. “Did you imagine maybe it was your wife or girlfriend when you did that?”

The man’s words were meant as a joke, but they, like the current situation, just pissed him off.

The Seraphim was eager to be free, as it always seemed to be these days, and Remy cut it some slack, letting it emerge enough to fill him with a warrior’s fury.

And the hunger for battle.

The ground was littered with bodies; he did not take the time to identify each and every one, but he knew that some of Samson’s children, as well as Delilah’s minions, had fallen.

But so had their enemy.

He snatched up the baseball bat dropped by Marko’s fallen enemy, hefting it in his hand, and waded into combat.

As he swung, blocked, and struck out with the weapon, his mind flashed back to an earlier time—a time when he fought on the side of the Almighty against those who had attempted to usurp His holy rule. Remy remembered the anger, and disgust, he’d felt for his enemy—those who had once been his brothers—and immersed himself in battle.

The Seraphim was elated, attempting more and more to exert its influence, trying with all its might to persuade Remy to let it be completely free.

It whined pathetically in Remy’s ear, telling him that the battle in which he now fought would be over in a matter of seconds if only he would let go.

The temptation was great, as it always was, but Remy remained in control, letting his fragile human nature hold sway over the power of Heaven.

The Seraphim was not in the least bit happy with this as it moved about the road, smiting its enemies with savage precision, but it knew that it must take what it was offered. Always holding out hope that someday it would be free, and that not a trace of the false humanity that held back its full essence would exist to suppress its holy might.

It could dream, Remy thought as he smashed a man with his handgun across the face in a shower of teeth and blood.

At least he could give it that.

As the newest to face his angelic wrath dropped to the road in a twitching pile, Remy saw that others were running, abandoning the fight.

Still at the ready, he stopped, examining the situation.

Samson was in the process of picking up a squirming man and smashing him down onto the ground. Samson’s spawn and Delilah’s faithful watched as their enemies suddenly stopped their fighting, turning tail to disappear into the shadows of the woods around them.

“Looks like they had enough,” one of Samson’s daughters, a young lady in her mid-twenties with a lime green Mohawk, proclaimed as she pumped her fist in the air victoriously.

The Seraphim wanted more. It always wanted more; more fighting, more blood, more violence, but Remy forced it back, putting the genie in the bottle yet again.

“What do you think, Samson?” Remy asked, still holding his baseball bat, glinting oily black in the light of the half-moon.

“Not sure,” the big man said, sniffing the air. “Could’ve just been a test.”

“A test?”

“Yeah, to try us on for size . . . see how much of a threat we might be.”

It sounded logical enough to him. “Obviously they saw enough.”

“Yeah,” Samson said, again looking around with his blind eyes, his nose twitching.

Remy heard the sound of a voice speaking rapidly, and he searched for the source. Over to the side, nearly hidden in some tall brush, he saw one of Delilah’s men standing over one of their fallen enemies, a machete ready to descend.

Moving quickly, Remy grabbed hold of the man’s wrist just as the blood-speckled blade began to fall. “No more,” he said, his eyes burning into the man’s.

Delilah’s follower had the stink of one on the verge of losing everything. From what Remy could sense, he still had some of his soul, but it wouldn’t be long until that too was gone.

The man snarled, attempting to pull his arm away, but Remy held fast.

“I’ll break it at the wrist,” Remy warned, causing the man to stop his struggles. “Go,” Remy ordered, releasing his hold.

At first it appeared the man was going to defy him, but he then thought better of it—a wise choice.

Remy knelt beside the fallen man, who still lay upon the ground. Severely injured, he clutched his blood-soaked side where he had been stabbed.

The stink of approaching death was upon him, and Remy leaned in to hear what he was saying.

“He came . . . just like the pastor said he would,” the man said. There was blood on his lips now, signifying some sort of internal injury. “He came to us . . . only to us to prove we are the faithful. We are the faithful, oh yes.”

“Who came?” Remy asked, laying a calming hand upon the man’s shoulder.

The man’s eyes focused upon him, seeing him for the first time.

“Dagon,” he said with a laugh. There were tears in his eyes, tears of joy. “Dagon came to us. . . .”

He began to cough, spatters of blood freckling his face, as streams ran down from the sides of his mouth.

“I’m looking for a little girl,” Remy said urgently, sensing that death was near. “Was she there with you?”

The dying man seemed to momentarily focus, listening to Remy’s question.

“Yes.” His voice was no more than a whisper now. “Yes . . . the Judas and his child.”

Remy felt his heart begin to beat faster.

“Are they all right?” he asked.

The follower of Dagon didn’t answer, his eyes beginning to glaze over as he gazed into the beyond.

Remy could sense the Angel of Death’s approach. Grabbing the man by the shoulders, he attempted to infuse just a little bit of his own life force into the man so that he would be able to answer.

But it was too late, and the man was gone, the last of his breath whistling from his lungs like air from a punctured tire.

“Anything?” Samson asked, approaching with his children.

“He said the father and child are there,” Remy said, rising to his feet. “But that’s all I know.”

“Seems like enough,” Samson said with a nod. “We’ll continue on and take it from there.”

Remy agreed, heading back to the SUVs stopped by the side of the desolate, backwoods road.

He watched as Samson’s children took care of their fallen, carrying them gently to the trucks, placing them in the back. The same could not be said of Delilah’s followers; their fallen were left in the road where they’d been killed, along with the bodies of the enemy.

Remy was tempted to do something, but time was now of the essence. Dagon’s followers who had fled the battle would return to the compound, warning the ancient deity that they were coming. At the moment, there was no time to respect the dead.

Going to the SUV where he’d left Deryn and Delilah, he found the passenger-side front door open, and suddenly he experienced a very bad feeling.

“Deryn,” Remy called out, hanging on to the door and finding the vehicle empty.

“Deryn!” he cried again, thinking maybe they had been forced from the car and were hiding nearby. “Deryn, are you out there?”

“They’re gone, aren’t they?” he heard Samson say.

“Yeah,” Remy said, immediately fearing the worst.

The big man chuckled. “Are you surprised?” he asked. “Delilah really has her heart set on finding that little girl.”

“And you think she took Deryn so she’d get there first?” Remy asked.

“Do you see her boy toy, Mathias, around anyplace?” he then asked.

Remy searched the crowd, and even the dead.

“No, looks like he’s gone too.”

“Then the answer to your question is yes,” Samson said. He started toward the row of SUVs parked behind the first. “We probably want to get to that compound as quickly as we can before Delilah has the chance to get into what she’s really up to.”

It was Mathias who had found her at last.

Nothing but withered flesh and bones, she was curled in the fetal position in the lowest section of the archaeological dig.

She’d returned home, long before the Palestinian settlement of Sorek had been rediscovered, hoping to find—to remember—a time when she had been human. The city had been buried deep beneath the shifting sands, covered up by the passage of time, but she’d known it was there, homing in on the place as if following posted signs by the side of the road.

Delilah could sense it there beneath her. She could practically hear the sounds of the marketplace again, the children at play.

The cries of her lost humanity calling out.

A reminder that she must suffer for her sins.

Suffer she did, and as she suffered, she was transformed into something fearful, and so far from God that she couldn’t imagine ever finding her way back.

But she tried, even after the deaths of loved ones—struck down, she believed, by an angry God—searching for a way she could show she was sorry.

This was why she had returned to the city of her birth, a city long since dead, but the place where it had all begun for her.

Like an animal of the earth, she had burrowed down into the sand, returning to a place where she had once felt safe.

And she found that trace of peace again beneath the desert sand, and she nested there in the home that had belonged to her family for generations.

That was where she lay, unfound, unnoticed, and unloved.

Until he found her.

Mathias.

She hadn’t noticed how much grayer his hair had become over their time together.

Delilah looked at him—really looked at him—as they paused in the darkness on the outskirts of the church compound.

When did he become so old? she asked herself, barely aware of the passage of time since the death of her humanity. He had been so handsome when she’d first laid eyes upon him.

Delilah could still remember the feeling of his rough hands as they plunged down into the sand and drew her upward. For some reason he had been drawn to her, to the archaeological dig that had uncovered her home and village.

He’d said he could hear her crying inside his head, and before he went mad, he’d gone in search of her.

How horrible she must’ve looked after all that time beneath the ground, but that did not stop him. She recalled how he tenderly brushed the sand from her mummified lips, and slowly . . . longingly . . . placed his own lips to hers, feeding her for the first time in . . .

The former mercenary held up a hand, directing them to stop, as he scanned the area for threats.

“She’s close by,” Deryn said as softly as she was able to in her present condition, ringing her hands together as she almost ran in place.

It hadn’t taken much to convince the woman to leave the safety of the SUV. Her daughter’s presence was practically screaming for her to follow.

And Delilah was more than happy to oblige.

Mathias gestured for them to follow him. They carefully negotiated a heavily overgrown hill, moving through the bushes and bramble to come out at the back of a row of buildings. There were trash barrels outside the doors, and clotheslines strung between the buildings, and trees directly across; Delilah guessed these were the church’s living quarters.

They waited, she and Mathias, looking toward Deryn to show them the way.

The woman held out a trembling hand, pointing down a ways to the back of a much larger, brick structure. They continued on to it cautiously. A single light burned above the door, and Mathias reached up to unscrew it, plunging the area into darkness.

“She’s inside,” Deryn said, barely able to contain her emotion.

“Then that’s where we need to be,” Delilah said, placing a comforting hand upon the woman’s shoulder.

She could hardly manage her own excitement, sensing the power of the thing she’d desired for so many years . . . the key to her freedom.

“Mathias,” she urged.

The man first tried the door and found it locked. From his back pocket, he produced a pocketknife and, kneeling down, went to work on the door.

It felt right that Mathias would be here with her; that he would be the one who would help her achieve her goal. Of all she had feasted upon, he was the strongest.

Delilah had always been amused by the former soldier’s ability to function without a soul. While others eventually withered and died, Mathias had kept going.

It was almost as if he were made especially for her.

She had not taken his soul all at once, instead choosing to feed upon it a little at a time, slowly returning to health.

To beauty.

It wasn’t long after her return that she had had the dream telling her how she could free herself, but why just be free, when the power of God could be used to make things right?

Delilah hoped she remembered them all, the husbands and children who were once part of her life, but she was sure the stuff of creation would help her to remember if necessary.

Tingling with anticipation, she heard the creak of hinges as the door swung open to allow them admittance.

Mathias turned and looked at her as he slipped the tool back into his pocket. She could see he wanted her praise; anything to set him apart from the others she possessed.

But she said nothing, walking past him through the door and into the semidarkness of a corridor, lit only by the red glow of an emergency exit sign.

“Always leave them hungry” had been her motto for millennia, and she wasn’t about to forget it now.

She could feel the object as she had in Vietnam, only this time it was stronger, calling out to her, teasing her. She was starting down the hall when someone moved past her at a run.

“She’s down here,” Deryn York said, pushing her aside. “Zoe,” the mother called out. “Zoe, honey, it’s Mommy.”

She was running now, heels clicking upon the linoleum floor.

“Get her back here!” Mathias hissed.

“Deryn,” Delilah said, attempting to use her ability to snag the woman’s attention and bring her back.

But it had no effect.

She continued down the corridor, Delilah and Mathias close behind.

The corridor turned right into darkness, and Mathias reached out to halt the woman’s progress, but she evaded his grasp, plunging into the shadows, desperately calling out her daughter’s name.

Delilah held back, centuries of survival instincts suddenly coming alive and warning her that all was not as it seemed.

“Zoe?” Deryn called out. “Come out . . . please. . . . It’s Mommy, honey. . . .”

The room was suddenly illuminated in a soft, pulsing glow.

“Mommy?” a tiny voice asked.

The child sat upon the floor, the light of creation that radiated from her tiny form pushing back the darkness that threatened to overwhelm her on both sides.

Delilah gasped at the vision; she was so close after all this time. She started to move toward the mother and child, when Mathias’ hand stopped her.

Deryn pushed through the shadows toward her daughter, unaware that she was not alone in the darkness.

It emerged just as she reached the little girl, jumping out to block her.

Delilah knew that at one time it had been a man, but now . . .

“Hello, Deryn,” the man said, the voice hollow, lacking humanity.

“Carl?” the woman questioned, but she did not back away, even as the man brought his hand up, emerging from the darkness that seemed to surround him like a shroud.

In a glinting arc, he thrust the blade into her belly.

“You shouldn’t have come,” the man said in that same, chilling monotone. “She doesn’t belong to us anymore. She belongs to Dagon.”

They’d driven a ways farther down the lonely, backwoods road, when Samson began to act up.

No longer having Deryn to guide them, they thought they might have some problems, but the big man picked up on Delilah’s scent without any problem.

“Think we should pull over here,” Samson said from the front seat of the SUV, moving his shaggy head around. “The bitch’s stink is pretty strong right here.”

From the backseat, Remy turned around to see that the other vehicles were pulling over as well, their army climbing from the trucks, weapons in hand.

He was still carrying the Colt 45, and unnecessarily checked the clip to make sure it was still loaded with its special bullets. Everything as expected, he slipped the gun back into the holster he wore beneath his arm.

“You want something bigger?” Marko asked him.

“No, this should be fine,” Remy told him.

“Think I might have an extra shotgun, or Mac 10 if you—”

“No, this’ll be fine,” he told the man again.

“Suit yourself,” Marko said, climbing from the car to retrieve his own weapons in the back of the vehicle, pushing aside some of the dead they carried to get at them.

Samson still sat in the passenger seat, his sightless eyes gazing out at the West Virginian night.

“Are you ready for this?” Remy asked, placing a hand upon the big man’s shoulder.

“I’ve been ready for this for . . .” He thought for a moment but then gave up on the specifics. “Let’s just say for a long fucking time.”

Curiosity got the better of Remy, and he found the question slipping out before he could think better of it.

“And then what?” Remy asked him.

“What do you mean?”

“After this . . . Delilah will most likely be dead, and your purpose, your special task will be done. What then?”

Samson said nothing but fished in his shirt pocket to remove his crumpled pack of cigarettes. He remained silent as he fished one out, returned the pack to where he’d found it, and then lit up.

“I’ve lived a very long time, Remy,” he said, tilting his head back to make sure Remy could hear him. “And even with the mission, I’ve done some pretty amazing things while I’ve been here.” He puffed on his smoke. “Have done some pretty fucking stupid things too, but everybody does that despite what they say.”

“I hear you,” Remy agreed.

“Think I might call it a day,” the strongman said.

“Really?” Remy asked, surprised by the answer.

“Yeah, it’s been a good run, but the bitch . . . Delilah was my fuel,” he explained. “My passion. With her gone, I just wouldn’t be angry enough anymore to keep the furnaces stoked . . . to keep the machine going.”

“Interesting,” Remy said.

“Yeah, but remember, this is all based on the fact that she’s going to bite it,” Samson explained. “But I happen to know she’s got more fucking lives than a cat with multiple personalities.”

“There’s that,” Remy said as he remembered Delilah’s explanation, her passionate plea as she explained that she wanted to die.

He remembered the odd statement she’d made in the car before the attack—that soon she’d be holding her own again.

“Did she ever have any children?” Remy asked.

“Who? Delilah?” Samson responded, a bit surprised.

“Yeah, I was just thinking about something she said earlier tonight that confused me.”

“Yeah,” Samson said. “She’s been around as long as I have. . . . She had lots of kids . . . husbands. The whole package.”

He paused. Remy could sense there was more.

“Didn’t work out well for any of them though,” the big man said, finishing up his cigarette.

“How so?”

“God would only allow her temporary happiness, before He took it all away.”

“Sounds like Him,” Remy grumbled.

“Yeah, but remember, she was cursed. So she’d think she was doing okay, let her guard down, and then the Big Guy would do something to show her how fucked she still was—disease, natural disasters, birth defects. Hell, even my kids and I found her living happily ever after a few times over the centuries.”

“But she got away.”

“Yeah, she did,” Samson said.

“And her family?”

Samson didn’t answer the question before he opened the SUV door.

“Think we should get this party started,” the big man said, a somber chill now in his voice.

“A party,” Remy said, climbing from the vehicle as well. “Yeah, right.”

They were all standing around outside their vehicles, weapons drawn and ready for war.

Is that what this is? Remy thought, staring at them all, the soulless as well as the children of a near immortal. He guessed that was the case, but usually in war, there was at least a unified reason as to why the battle must be fought. In this case, there were multiple sides, each of them fighting for something different. Only the battlefield was the same.

Remy knew why he was fighting, and whom he was fighting for, and that was all that really mattered at this stage of the game.

Samson was giving a sort of pep talk to the troops. He could see the large man’s children listening to every word, while Delilah’s people just stared ahead blankly, murder in their gazes. They did what Delilah had instructed them to do, and that was pretty much it. But as long as they weren’t fighting one another at the moment, things were working out all right.

It was hot and extremely humid in West Virginia, the nighttime life all singing one cacophonous song composed of buzzing, chirping, shrieking, and croaking.

That all went quiet as the warriors started into the woods.

Samson and his kids led the way, with Delilah’s minions backing up the rear. One of Samson’s youngest, somebody they called Little Shit, had run on ahead, moving from tree to tree, shadow to shadow, before being swallowed up by the woods.

It wasn’t too long before he was back with his intel.

“Straight ahead, up the hill and down,” the youngster explained in a whisper. “Looks like they plant their own crops and shit. We can make it right onto the compound property by cutting through the cornfields.”

“Then that’s what we’ll do,” Samson said, directing another of his kids to go back and tell the others what their plan was.

“Do you think the kid’s all right?” Samson asked, sensing that Remy had come to stand beside him.

“Don’t know,” Remy said, fearing the worst. “Hope so.”

“Me too,” Samson answered before cracking the knuckles on both large hands. “I’d like to at least see something good come out of the mess that I think is about to go down.”

Little Shit led them now, bringing them up the hill, halting them with an upheld fist, as he scanned the area down below.

“All right, it’s clear,” he said, gesturing for them to follow him.

They came down the incline into the crops, spreading out to walk between the rows. The corn still hung upon the tall stalks, large ears waiting to be harvested.

Moving between the rows, doing their best to remain as silent as possible, Remy hadn’t noticed that the nighttime life had grown accustomed to their presence, and had resumed its songs.

Until it went silent again.

He felt it almost immediately, a shift in the atmosphere telling him that something unnatural was about to happen. Remy almost cried out a warning, but it was already too late.

The corn ignited with an eerie blue flame.

All the stalks exploded into a smokeless fire, burning down to the ground in a matter of seconds and leaving them all completely exposed.

And then it was as if the sun had suddenly risen in the sky as the entire area became bathed in an eerie yellow light.

“It’s times like these when I’m glad I can’t see,” Samson said over to his left.

Remy shielded his eyes from the blazing light to see figures now standing up ahead.

“There you are,” the lead figure said with a growling chuckle.

Remy had no doubt that he was in the presence of the ancient god Dagon. He wasn’t sure what it was exactly, but it was either the golden, scaled skin, or the horns sprouting from his head that gave it away.

The warriors, now exposed, prepared to fight, the sounds of multiple weapons being readied to fire filling the night air. Remy looked around to see that the guns were all pointed straight ahead at their targets.

“Oh really,” Dagon said, bemused.

“Is he naked?” Samson asked.

Distracted, Remy looked over to the big man. “What?”

“Is the guy doing all the talking naked?”

“Yeah,” Remy said, “but I don’t think now’s the time to . . .”

“Can never take somebody who’s naked seriously,” Samson grumbled with a shake of his head, before issuing his command.

“Take ’em down!” Samson screamed, and his children, as well as Delilah’s soulless soldiers, opened fire.

Startled by the sudden violence, Remy ducked down, staring ahead to see the extent of the damage. The air was filled with the billowing smoke of the weapons’ discharge, but as it began to clear, he was met with the most disturbing of sights.

Those who had been attacking were down, their bodies bloodied by gunfire, but the god . . .

The god was untouched.

“How’d we do?” Samson asked.

“Not too bad, unless we were trying to take out Dagon.”

“Ah shit,” the strongman said, kicking the dirt. “Why can’t anything be easy?”

Dagon first looked to the left, then to the right, studying the corpses of his acolytes.

His body seemed to glow all the brighter as he started to walk toward them. He walked about three feet before coming to a stop. The god then seemed to survey his surroundings, studying the dark earth now void of vegetation.

Some of Delilah’s followers had started to shoot again, but the bullets had zero effect, and the ancient deity seemed not to notice.

“Give me the bad news,” Samson requested.

“I really don’t know,” Remy said.

The god knelt upon one knee and brought one of his large hands forward, pushing his fingers down into the dirt.

“He’s touching the dirt,” Remy reported.

“What’s he doing that for?” Samson asked.

Remy remained silent, continuing to watch as a flash of divine energy was emitted from the god’s hand, the entire ground suddenly illuminated in a white-hot flash.

“Answer me, Remy. What’s going on?” Samson demanded to know.

Remy wasn’t sure how to answer, but the first of the screams to pierce the night was enough to tell them all that it wasn’t good.

Remy looked toward the sound to see a group of Delilah’s soldiers spinning around, searching for something, their guns at the ready. One of the men was suddenly gone, yanked down beneath the ground before he could cry out. It was repeated again, and again, one soldier after the next being pulled down beneath the ground by something unseen.

Dagon had risen to his full height, staring out across the empty field. The ground around him began to bubble and churn as if it were liquid.

And one after another, corpses in various stages of disrepair began to emerge, pulling themselves up out of the earth.

“I’m not going to ask you again, Chandler,” Samson said. He began to lumber toward the sounds of the sickly moans as the dead crawled up from the dirt.

“It’s times like these you should be glad you can’t see,” Remy said, pulling the Colt 45 from the holster beneath his arm and chambering a round into the weapon.