chapter XXI
Somewhere over the South Atlantic, present day
IT WAS LIKE WE were shot out of a cannon. Everything around us was completely dark, and if it was difficult to hold onto both Michael and the parachute in the confines of the plane, it was seriously close to impossible while falling through the sky. All the problems I had inside the plane were now magnified: it was louder, harder to breathe, more physically demanding, and I couldn’t see because I couldn’t open my eyes.
She said, “Let Ellie help you.” It was a good thing I had ample warning, because before I knew it Ellie was shouting in my ear again. Something about getting the parachute on. Clumsily, I gave her one arm at a time as she helped cinch everything up. This is insane. The straps were either big enough to bundle me together with Michael or there was an extra set. I didn’t care about details, I just wanted the madness to end.
I worried that we were going to hit the ocean at any minute, that I wouldn’t see it coming. It was really bizarre that my number one instinct was to see it coming when it came. Now that there was at least a parachute though, everything should have balanced out. But it didn’t.
She was going berserk I my head, Ellie was shouting, the wind from our descent was debilitating.
I forced my eyes to open. My tear ducts were emptying themselves in the fierce wind and my vision was blurry. It didn’t help that we were falling through the last dying embers of the sunset, either; it was almost pitch black.
Except for a weird cluster of light off to one side, that is. As my brain tried to process this new information, I became sick with fright: I was looking at the city lights of Cape Town. From like, thousands of feet above it. I could see the outline of the coast of South Africa below, but it wasn’t directly below. It was below and far away. We were going to fall into the ocean.
Ellie shouted something into my ear again, grasped something on the front of me and then pushed off violently, yanking hard on the straps as she went. “Hey!” I shouted in total impotence, the pelting wind sucking all the volume from me. And then I realized something new. Ellie had pulled my ripcord.
It was like hitting pavement. Or maybe like getting your arms ripped completely off. Whatever the case, the chute opened above and Michael and I were saved. I realized how thankful I needed to be for all that had happened at Ellie’s hands. I couldn’t have held onto Michael if I had wanted to. I was very glad to have him strapped to me.
I looked around me, trying to orient myself by the lights of the city and what remained of the sunset behind us. Below, I saw Ellie’s chute deploy in a bright red and white flume, filling with air, arresting her descent as well.
I breathed a sigh of relief and wept silently to myself. This is totally crazy. I can’t believe Hex and Bishop! Is Michael okay? How do we get out of this one? Are we going to just crash into the ocean? Who will save us then?
I looked out to the horizon again, glad for a moment’s peace. A bloom of white and orange erupted far below us. That was the plane. It just crashed into the ocean.
Then something flew by me. Something big and dark. Dark. My mind returned to the dark cloud I had seen from the cockpit before everything had gone horrible.
“Get ready,” She said.
Cape Town, South Africa, present day
It hadn’t taken long at such a late hour for Kreios to drive the little Toyota bakkie from Muizenberg to Cape Town’s business district. He had parked about a half a kilometer from the building.
It was a major landmark, one of the tallest in the city. The ruse was that the company drilled for, refined, shipped and bought and sold speculative shares of oil. And that provided its masters with the resources they needed to ply their real trade. Kreios knew it all; how could he not? The wicked hands at these controls belonged to fallen angels with whom he had once dwelt in paradise. Before all the stars fell.
He decided on a direct course of action. Something bold, impetuous. He would see how many he would have to kill before the Nri Infernals noticed.
As he walked along the sidewalk at the front of the building, he looked inside the massive lobby through the glass. There was a lone security guard at the enormous desk, which rose like a sailing ship’s quarterdeck above the lobby. Beyond it were the main elevators, eight of them.
The guard’s head jerked up as Kreios neared the main revolving doors. Slowly, as the truth descended upon his features, the guard’s face went white with abject fear.
Kreios carried with him no natural weapon. It wasn’t his appearance that had given the guard cause for fear. It was simply that Kreios, now fully aware once more of his body of work over thousands of years, was in close proximity now. And when El’s angel of death was upon the doorstep what happened next was inevitable. Final.
The guard stood and began to tremble like a frightened child. Some of his trembling was due to the fact that his Brother was ripping out of his flesh, becoming fully manifest.
Kreios stopped at the revolving front doors, of which there were a pair. Their partitioning panes of glass were arrayed at ninety degree intervals along their axes of rotation and extended out from there in a radius of at least eight feet, all glass.
Inside the glass façade there was the security desk, set up like a fortress, a command post in the midst of the lobby, and behind that were the elevator cars.
Kreios turned to face his objective. He saw beyond the glass, the polished tiles, the electronic surveillance and security measures, the steel-reinforced concrete. He saw, much like he had seen on the night of the original Passover, not just that there was no signal of atonement on the “lintels,” such as there were. No, indeed, not only was this building not excepted from him, it was covered with sign upon sign and symbol upon symbol of its effrontery to El, the enmity it not only represented but embodied. It stood as a monument to itself. It was therefore precisely identical to Lucifer, which was intentional on the part of its masters.
Kreios widened his stance, bending at the knees, and removed his hands from the pocket of his hoodie sweater.
Somewhere over the South Atlantic, present day
“Reserve chute.” It was cryptic even for She. But it soon became clear.
The dark cloud, a.k.a. a huge cluster of freaking demons, was swarming. They were coming out of nowhere, they were everywhere, swooping in, through and around us at all times. Meanwhile Michael and I were just hanging there in the sky, a punching bag, a dangling bullseye.
I could tell one of them was bigger than the rest. Worse, it was hounding me. I could feel it circling us, feel the massive bursts of air pressure from its wings, and I caught glimpses of its hideous shape as it passed under me.
In one fell swoop, all the cords holding us to our parachute were cut. We were falling again. And though I couldn’t see much, I could see enough to know that we didn’t have much time.
My first reaction was stark fear. But something within me rose up and protested against it, told me I was tired of it already. I became contemptuous. That was the only word for it. Letting go of Michael, fully trusting the straps for the first time, I held my hands out.
This stabilized our flight, sending us on a straight trajectory. I scanned what bits of the sky I could see. There were dark shapes flitting everywhere. I couldn’t see Ellie’s chute. I assumed she too had been cut loose. I also could not see the jerk that had sent us plummeting again.
I quickly realized that I could steer by shifting the position of my limbs. If I put my feet together and held only one arm close to my body, my outstretched arm produced drag and we spun in a barrel roll. Using this newfound trick, I wheeled us clumsily around to face the heavens. I squinted, trying to see, looking around desperately for my prime offender.
I wanted something from it. A wing would do. Perhaps a leg as well.
My mind pulled into wild abstractions, I digressed from this macabre list of menu items to my last conversation with Hex. Have you ever seen the stars? They are beautiful up here…. It was true. Though I was hurtling to the earth at probably hundreds of miles per hour, strapped to my boyfriend no less, I had to admit it. The stars were beautiful.
But there was a massive hole in them. A vacuum of light. And it was getting bigger. Or nearer.
“Come on!” was all my mind could produce from my lips as the Sword of Light blazed forth, coming to my hand, ready for battle. In its piercing acetylene light I saw the menacing outline of my enemy.