“Why can’t he just leave me alone?” Aaron asked, the weight of his responsibilities beginning to wear upon him. “Why does it have to be this way?”
Belphegor sighed as he looked up at the early morning sky above Aerie. “Verchiel’s still fighting the war, I think,” he said after a bit of thought. “So caught up in righting a wrong, that he can’t accept the idea that the battle is over. There’s a new age dawning, Aaron.” Belphegor slowly squatted down, and Aaron could hear the popping of his ancient joints. “Whether he likes it or not.”
Aaron looked into the old angel’s eyes, searching for a bit of strength he could borrow.
“And you’re the harbinger,” he continued. “Whether you like it or not.”
“But I’m responsible for ruining this,” Aaron said, motioning toward the neighborhood around them. “Verchiel and his Powers are probably coming here because of me.”
“Looks that way,” Belphegor said, calmly straightening up. “But we never expected it to be easy.”
Lehash left the crowd of citizens and came to them. The constable’s eyes had turned to dark, shiny marbles in the recesses of his shadowed brow. “Is this how he’s going to save us?” he asked Belphegor, speaking loud enough for everyone to hear. “Crying in the street? I always expected that a savior would have more balls than that, but I guess I was wrong.”
It couldn’t have hurt worse if Lehash had pulled out his pistols and shot him again. The constable’s words cut deep, and Aaron felt the power of angels surge through his body again. The sigils rose up on his flesh, his body afire as he leaped to his feet, his wings of shadow propelling him at the angel who had hurt him so.
“Do you want to see balls, Lehash?” he asked in a voice more animal than man. A sword of fire had materialized in his hand, and he stood ready to strike.
Lehash had drawn his golden guns. “Show me what you’re gonna do when the Powers come for us, Nephilim,” the gunslinger demanded, his thumbs playing with the hammers of his supernatural weapons. “Show me how powerful you are when they start to burn us alive.”
Belphegor stepped between them, placing a hand on each of their chests. With little effort, he pushed them both apart. “This isn’t going to help anything,” the Founder of Aerie said, giving each a piece of his icy stare. “There’s a storm coming, and no matter how much we rail against it—or one another—it doesn’t change the fact that the rain is going to fall.”
Aaron felt it at the nape of his neck, a slight tingle that made the hair stand at attention. He turned to see that something was taking shape in the air across the street from them.
“Camael?” Aaron asked, starting toward the disturbance.
Belphegor grabbed hold of his arm. “Wait,” he demanded.
Aaron pulled away, certain that it was his friend who had returned. Camael’s wings spread wide to reveal him, and Aaron gasped at the sight. The angel clutched his stomach, blood flowing from a wound to stain the streets of Aerie. Camael pitched forward as Aaron ran to him.
“It comes,” he heard Belphegor say in a foreboding whisper at his back. “The storm comes.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
There was so much blood.
Aaron cradled the body of the angel warrior in his arms, feeling Camael’s life force ebbing away. He was reminded of that horrible day he had knelt in the middle of the street holding a dying Gabriel. He had never wanted to feel that way again, but here it was, as painful as the last time.
“I can do something,” he said to his friend in an attempt to rally some confidence not only for Camael, but also for himself. Aaron reached deep within, searching for that spark of the divine that would allow him to save his mentor as he had his pet.
Camael took Aaron’s hand in his. “Do not waste your strength on a lost cause, boy,” he said, his grip firm, but weakening.
Aaron held the angel to him, gazing in mute horror at the stab wounds in his friend’s back. One was a blackened hole characteristic of a heavenly weapon’s bite, but the other showed no sign of cauterization and bled profusely. “We’ll stop the bleeding and you’ll be all right,” he told his friend, pressing his hand firmly against the wound.
Camael shuddered, and a fresh geyser of dark blood sprayed from the wound. The blood was warm, its smell pungent. “It will not stop.” He struggled to sit up. “The enchanted metal and Verchiel’s sword,” he strained, “I fear it was a most lethal combination.”
“Lie still, we can—”
Camael still held Aaron’s hand and rallied his strength to squeeze it all the harder. “I did not return to have you save my pathetic life,” the angel said, the intensity of his stare grabbing Aaron’s attention and holding it firm. “I never considered that the prophecy would apply to me … that I could be forgiven.”
“Stop talking like that,” Aaron said, dismissing the fatalistic words of his mentor.
Many of the citizens who had gathered in front of Belphegor’s home now stood in a tight circle around Aaron and Camael, watching the drama unfold. One of the men stripped off his T-shirt and offered it to Aaron to use as a compress against the angel’s bleeding wound.
“I’ve saved many lives in my time on this world,” Camael reflected. “But I don’t believe it will ever balance the scales against the lives I took as leader of the Powers.”
“How can you be sure, Camael?” Aaron asked in an attempt to keep his friend with him, to keep him focused. He gestured at the circle around them. “Most of them wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.”
Camael looked at him with eyes that had grown tired, eyes that had seen so much. “Deep down I knew that it was wrong, but still I kept on with the killing, for I believed that it was what He wanted of me. How sad that it took the writings of a human seer to force me to come to my senses.” He laughed and dark blood spilled from his mouth to stain his silver goatee. “Imagine that,” he said with a weary smile. “It took a lowly human to show me the error of my ways.”
Aaron chuckled sadly. “Yeah, imagine that.”
The angel warrior’s body was suddenly wracked with spasms of coughing that threatened to shake away what little life there still was in his dying frame. Time, as it always seemed to be, was running out.
“Is he going to die?” one of the citizens, a girl probably only a few years older than Aaron, asked. There were tears in her eyes, and in the eyes of all present. He could not bring himself to answer, even though the inevitable seemed obvious.
“That is the burning question of the day,”
Camael answered, looking at Aaron. “Will I die here on the street of the place I sought so long to find?” He pulled Aaron closer as he asked the question, the source of the strength that had allowed him to return to Aerie. “Or might I actually be forgiven?” the angel asked wistfully. “Only you have the answer.”
Aaron could sense that his friend’s time was short. “Shall we find out?” he asked Camael, reaching down into the center of his being to find the gift of redemption. It was there, waiting for him as he imagined it would be. He called forth the heavenly essence, drawing upon it, feeling its might rise up and flow down his arm into one of his hands. The facility to redeem danced upon his fingertips, and Aaron looked compassionately to the angel that had shown him the road to his destiny. He wrestled with feelings of intense emotion: sadness, for he would not be seeing his friend again, and great happiness, for Camael would be going home.
Camael began to pray, his weary eyes tightly closed. “Have mercy upon me, O God. With the multitude of Your tender mercies, blot out my offenses.”