The Fallen

Cassiel shrieked and attacked again. “It will never come to be,” he screamed as a dagger appeared in his hand and he slashed at Camael, driving him away. “Lies, all lies!”

Camael recoiled from a swipe of Cassiel’s blade, reared back, and drove the heel of his foot into the angel’s chest. Cassiel was propelled back by the force of the blow and tumbled over a chair in front of the desk.

The smoke had grown thicker and Camael knew that it wouldn’t be long before the office was completely consumed by fire. He had to find out the identity of the boy. The essence about this Nephilim is strong, perhaps the strongest I have ever felt, he thought. So strong, in fact, that the Powers had no need of a tracker to find him. He tensed, waiting for Cassiel to rise, his mind aflutter. Could he be the reason why Verchiel has increased the frequency and savagery of his attacks? He again dared to wonder, could this actually be the One?

Camael screamed out in sudden pain and rage as Hadriel’s spear tore through his shoulder from behind. It was sloppy of him. Distracted by his musings, he had failed to notice Verchiel’s other henchman emerge from the thick smoke, a new weapon in hand.

“Finish him,” Cassiel ordered as he climbed to his feet among the flames.

Hadriel pulled back the spearhead and lunged again, but this time Camael was ready. He sprang from the floor, wings spread. He had summoned new weapons as well—short swords—from the armory of his imagination and held one firmly in each hand.

Hadriel’s thrust passed beneath him and before he could react, Camael brought one of his swords viciously down, cleaving the angel’s skull like the wood of a rotted tree stump.

“No!” Cassiel shrieked as he soared toward Camael, eager to avenge his fallen comrade.

“Verchiel’s soldiers have grown sloppy,” Camael taunted as he pulled the weapon from the angel’s skull and blocked the enraged Cassiel’s attack with it. He thrust upward with the other blade and pierced his attacker’s chest.

Cassiel wailed and thrashed, his wings beating frantically, as he fell to the floor clutching at the weeping chest wound.

Camael strode through the smoke and fire toward his fallen foe. “What does Verchiel know about this one—the Nephilim boy?” he questioned. “Tell me and I’ll let you live.”

Cassiel struggled to his feet using the wall for support. “You’ll let me live? Do you hear yourself, Camael? I thought you deserted the Powers because you tired of the violence, of all the killing.” The angel held a trembling hand to his bleeding wound. “I think you’ve become what you most hate,” Cassiel hissed as he reached into the fire by the wall and pulled out the blackened, still-burning skull of the psychiatrist and hurled it at him.

Camael hacked at the flaming projectile, cutting it in two as it neared him. Using the moment, Cassiel spread his wings and leaped toward the burning curtains across the room. The fleeing angel passed through the flaming material, and then the glass of the window beyond, to escape with an explosive crash.

The fire burned brighter, larger, as the sudden blast of oxygen fed the hungry conflagration.

The Nephilim’s identity more important than pursuit, Camael rushed to the desk. The papers strewn about its surface had already started to smolder and curl. His eyes sca

Beneath a folder charred at the edges, he saw it. A single sentence scrawled upon a piece of notepaper attached to a file. “Patient believes he now has the ability to understand and speak all foreign languages.”

Camael snatched up the folder. Something moaned above him and he moved out of the way as a portion of the ceiling collapsed in a shower of flaming debris. In the distance, the mournful howls of fire engines filled the air. He had what he needed and prepared to leave the scene with haste.

Time was of the essence, for as soon as Verchiel learned of his involvement, all Hell would most assuredly break loose.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Within the unused bell tower of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament, Verchiel stared into the familiar face of human mortality. Since the Powers’ return from the poisonous wasteland that was Chernobyl, their human tracker had fallen terribly ill. The poor creature lay upon a plastic tarp in a darkened area of the tower where once a bell had hung. It shivered, moaning softly as it slowly died from the radioactive poisons it had been exposed to on their last hunt.

“Is there nothing more you can do for it?” Verchiel asked the human healer who was administering to the wounded Cassiel.

The healer, called Kraus, turned his blind, cataract-covered eyes toward the sound of Verchiel’s voice.

“I’ve done all I can, my master,” he said as he nimbly plucked a golden needle from inside a worn leather satchel and deftly placed a thick thread through its eye. His lack of vision had not affected his skill with a needle. “It won’t be long before he succumbs to—”

“Its skill served me well,” the Powers’ leader interrupted, taking his eyes from the dying boy covered in black oozing sores. “It will be bothersome to find another.”

Verchiel moved across the cluttered tower, its space now used for storage, to loom over the healer and his current patient, the boy almost completely forgotten. “And you, Cassiel,” he asked smoothly, “have you served me as well?”

“Yes, my lord,” Cassiel answered breathlessly as he lay upon the dusty floor while the blind old man sewed closed his wound.

“You say that Camael was there before you?” Verchiel asked as he watched the old man, whose job it was to care for the angels’ physical forms, pull shut the wound in his soldier’s chest with skillful stitches. Though primitive by angelic standards, the human apes did occasionally surprise even him with their usefulness.

Verchiel squatted beside the healer as he completed the task. “He will heal?” Verchiel asked. “The wound will not kill him?”

Kraus flinched from the power of Verchiel’s voice. “It…it will not,” the man stammered as he turned his blind gaze toward his master. “The injury will need time to mend, but it will heal.”

What is it about the defective ones, the blind, the mentally challenged, that makes them such superior servants? Verchiel wondered, thinking of the nonimpaired humans often driven to madness just by being in the angels’ presence.

“You are done here,” Verchiel proclaimed, and gently brushed the top of the older man’s head with the tips of his fingers. “See to the tracker; ease him into death if need be.’

The man gasped aloud, his body trembling as if in rapture, as if touched by God—or the next best thing. Kraus folded shut his satchel of healing instruments and scurried away to the darkened corner to help a dying member of his own breed.

Perhaps their imperfections make them more receptive to the extraordinary. It was a hypothesis Verchiel hoped to explore further someday, when their mission was finally complete. He roused himself from his contemplation. There was still much to do.

“The Nephilim I sense so keenly—what information have you brought of him?” Verchiel asked Cassiel, who still lay upon the wooden floor.

“I bring information about Camael,” Cassiel said eagerly. “Living amongst the apes has made him frail and weak. It…it can only be a matter of time before we destroy the traitor and…”

“Frail and weak, you say?” Verchiel asked, a sour smile upon his thin lips. In the church below, Mass was begi