“You’d think the Thrones would have a better handle on this,” Remy groused, walking to the study’s entryway and kneeling beside the duffel bag they’d brought from Newbury Street.
“I believe they know exactly what they’re doing,” Karnighan said, having just about completed the circle of sigils painted with the blood of innocents.
Remy removed a short sword from within the bag, hefting its weight. He then removed the Glock that he’d loaded earlier, at Francis’ place.
“So I’m guessing they want me to cross over into Hell, and do what I can to prevent them from releasing Lucifer,” Remy said.
Karnighan surveyed his bloody work with a tilt of his head. “That sounds like the plan,” he answered. “My final instructions were to bring you here and to open a doorway.”
Madach knelt by the bag and began to rummage.
“What are you doing?” Remy asked him.
“Picking weapons,” he said as he withdrew a fearsome knife with a six-inch blade.
“No,” Remy stated. “You’ve helped enough.”
“I can do more,” Madach urged. “I’m responsible for this mess, and I should help to clean it up.”
With the help of his cane, Karnighan shakily rose to his feet and carefully stepped from the circle.
“You’ve already done your time in Hell,” Remy said, watching as the old man shuffled around the blood circle. Double-checking to make sure everything had been written down correctly, he imagined.
“You’ve helped me come this far, and I appreciate it. Go back to your life now; continue with your penance; stay away from the Denizens. Live a good life and maybe, depending on how all this works out, it’ll be looked at as just a minor bump in the road.”
Madach laughed. “Being the main reason why Lucifer was set free as a bump in the road.” He stuck the knife he’d chosen through the loop of his paint-stained jeans. “For some reason I just can’t see it.”
Karnighan leaned upon his cane, looking as though a gentle breeze could carry him away. “All is in place,” he said, looking first at Madach and then at Remy. “Now all I need to do is turn the key.”
He turned around to the circle, an incantation not meant for human mouths spilling from his withered lips. Slowly he raised his scrawny arms, cane still clutched in one of his hands. Karnighan’s voice seemed to gain in power as he continued to recite the arcane words of the first fallen sorcerers.
Remy felt it before seeing it, a sense that the floor beneath his feet was falling, reminding him of that final, stomach-flipping sensation just before an elevator reaches its destination. He gripped his weapons tighter, the Seraphim essence fully aware that it might be called upon.
But in this instance, he really didn’t mind, suspecting that the angelic nature caged inside him would be a necessity if he wanted to survive.
Karnighan wailed, extending the cane before him, waving the end around like a magician’s wand. There was a moment in which it was as if all the sound had been somehow sucked from the room. Then the hardwood floor in the center of the circle became like fluid, sucked down into the opening punched through the fabric of reality into Hell. It sounded like the world’s largest drain cleared of an obstruction.
Karnighan teetered on the brink, his frail, ancient form almost pulled over the rim of the conjured opening by the vortex.
Remy moved to help the man, to keep him from being yanked into the yawning breach. Wailing winds as well as screams and moans of another kind wafted up and out into the room as Remy took the old man’s arm.
A Tartarus Sentry emerged from the center of the new doorway, like a whale breaching. The armor of the giant—forged in Hell from the stuff of Heaven—was tattered and tarnished, covered in the gore of battle. It was missing a wing, the single appendage flapping uselessly, its armored feathers falling like autumn leaves.
Two Hellions crawled upon the prison guard, their powerful claws and teeth tearing away chunks of armor and the angelic flesh beneath as they climbed his body.
It all happened so fast.
The Sentry thrashed in defense of itself. In one of its massive hands it held a medieval cudgel, swinging it wildly as it attempted desperately to remove the ferocious attackers that tore at its body.
Remy watched in horror as the cudgel swung out, gliding through the air in slow motion, missing its intended prey and connecting with the upper body of Alfred Karnighan. There was a wet cracking sound, followed by a fine spray of crimson mist, as Karnighan’s body took the full brunt of the impact. The old man was launched across the room, hitting a back wall before dropping, broken and shattered, to a collection of furniture that had been moved there to make way for the conjured doorway.
Remy considered going to the man, but his eyes were drawn to the crimson stain high upon the wall. The old man’s point of impact dripped with blood and fragments of other matter, and Remy knew that there was nothing he could do.
The Sentry roared, his mournful cries muffled by the helmet that covered his face and head. One of the Hellions had managed to reach its prey’s neck, digging its fangs beneath the lip of the helmet and tearing out chunks of the divine flesh beneath. And as quickly as the mighty figure had erupted from the newly opened doorway, he was gone again, dragged away by the savage beasts that prowled the wastelands of Hell.
Remy stood at the edge of the yawning hole torn in the fabric of space and time, weapons clutched in his hands. Images of past battles, like the staccato blasts of machine-gun fire, flashed within his head, and he wondered if there would ever be a time that it was all just a memory, or if violence would always be a part of what he was.
But that rumination was for another time, the angel thought, when the affinity for bloodshed wasn’t a necessity for his continued survival.
The Seraphim clammored excitedly, the stench of Hell rousing it to attention. It was only a matter of time before it was free again.
Madach appeared beside him, knife in hand, a snub-nosed pistol stuffed in the waistband of his pants. Their eyes touched briefly, before both looked down into the sucking void that had been punched through reality, an oppressive blanket of hopelessness and despair being draped upon the shoulders of both men. The sounds of combat mixed with those of intense suffering, escaping from the entrance, a symphony of misery foreshadowing what was likely to come.
“Hear that?” Madach asked, raising his voice to be heard over the wails and cries. “They’re welcoming me back.”
And with those words, the fallen angel jumped down into the hole, disappearing within roiling, rust-colored clouds that stank of death and desperation.
Remy tensed, ready to join Madach, when he sensed them.
In the corner of the study they hovered, rolling balls of fire that watched him with multiple sets of unblinking eyes.
They didn’t even have the common decency to wish him luck.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
They’d been married only a very short time.
Marlowe had yet to enter their lives, and they were living in an apartment in Somerville. Their life was good together—better than good, really.
The love he felt for her, and she for him—it was like nothing he’d ever known. But that was a lie, for he had known the intensity of a love like it when in the presence of God.
And he could not help but feel a bit ashamed—and even a little astonished—that a love so great had been so easily replaced. But when he looked at her, lying beside him in bed, or typing up invoices in the office, he knew how it could be possible, for the Almighty had given humanity a piece of Himself, and it radiated through so much more brightly in some than in others.