Ethan gave her a guarded look. “Um … do you think an actual angel…?”
“Don’t be stupid,” she snapped, then immediately said, “Sorry. I didn’t mean it to come out like that.”
“No, it’s fine. I just don’t know how to have this conversation.”
Dana snorted. “No kidding.”
He smiled at her. “How are you not losing it after all that?”
“Who says I’m not?”
Ethan chose not to reply to that. Instead he cleared his throat and said, “How sure are you about her wounds? The, um, wounds of Jesus, I mean?”
Dana took her tracing of the body diagram and drew a series of straight lines and right angles as if the victim’s body were in front of a big wooden cross. She scribbled in a thorny crown and drew a crude spear with the blade stabbing deep. Ethan looked appalled, but then he began to nod.
“I read about mass murderers and cults and all that stuff all the time,” Ethan said. “There are a lot of total nut jobs out there who think God is telling them to kill people.”
“I know.” Dana absently touched her crucifix. “I think whoever did this was trying to make a statement.”
“What on earth kind of statement could any of that make?”
Instead of answering, Dana spent the next few minutes tracing the outlines of the other victims and penciling in the location of each wound. For the Asian boy, Jeffrey Watanabe, his car had been so badly torn up that he had actually been decapitated. Jennifer Hoffer had been impaled on the broken steering column of her car. Connie Lucas had been thrown through her car windshield. And there were scores of other injuries, too, which complicated everything. Ethan watched with great interest.
“Well … one thing’s clear,” he said when she was finished. “He’s not doing the same thing over and over again. They’re not all killed like Jesus.”
“No, but he’s definitely making some kind of statement. Something else religious,” she said, setting the papers down and sitting back. “I’d bet my life on it.”
Her words seemed to freeze in the air, haunting them both.
CHAPTER 35
Craiger, Maryland
1:38 P.M.
The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, his body running with sweat. Though it was still mild weather outside, inside the sacristy the temperature hovered above one hundred. There was no boiler running in the basement, no space heater, nothing to account for it.
Except the fires of his faith in the grigori.
Except the fires in his own flesh. Not the parts of him that were still human. The rest. The parts that were revealing themselves as nephilim, as a giant, not in size but in power, in glory, in understanding.
The Book of Enoch spoke about the grigori—whom the ancients called the Watchers—and how they left heaven to try to take control of humanity, that race of naughty, errant children. The glorious great ones had even married among humans, producing the nephilim, hoping that their own majesty would spread like a plague of greatness through the generations of man.
That had been a glorious thing.
That it had failed spoke more to the weakness of men than any fault of the Watchers. Men, though weak in the ways of the spirit, were as strong as they were stubborn when it came to following their greed, their lusts. They built their worlds with walls and towers and closed out the grigori. And the seed left behind, the nephilim offspring, became few and were scattered until no one of grace stood among the human herd. And the humans, those who bore no trace of holy blood, labored to destroy the nephilim, labeling them as devils, as demons, as witches, and hunting them to the edge of extinction. Sickened and sad over what man had become, the last of the grigori left the mortal plane and sealed the door behind them.
Until now.
Until he was born. Until he awakened within his own flesh and understood his nature, his mission, his purpose.
Until he realized that he was so much more than human.
Until he heard the soft, faint cries of others like him, trapped inside drab husks. Begging for release. Begging for him to free them.
It was his sacred duty to draw the nephilim forth to reclaim their heritage and then together break through the door that separated this world from the one into which the Watchers had gone.
And that work was going so very, very well.
The painting, though, was a challenge. It had taken him years to discover what the shape of the door needed to be. Not a simple portal, not a square or oblong window, but instead a portrait of a grigori. But how to do that? The Watchers were, in their truest forms, formless. Their nature was the furnace of life, of transformation, of magnificent change.
How to paint that?
The angel looked at what he had rendered. The grigori could speak to him through it, but it was not yet complete, and the words, the lessons from the other side, were not always clear. It was not yet a doorway.
He did not yet have enough blood to complete his sacred task.
His paintbrush lay on the floor next to the cold purity of his knife.
There was still so much to do.