It sounded like the crack of an enormous whip as another bolt descended, and the roof exploded in a flash of white and began to burn. So overwhelmed was he that he became careless. New instincts warned him not to turn his back on Verchiel, but he paid them no mind. He had to get to his friends; if there was anything he could do it had to be now.
Aaron was grabbed from behind, his arms and wings pinned against his body. He watched helplessly as his sword tumbled from his grip to evaporate in the air below.
“This is but the beginning,” the angel whispered maliciously in his ear.
Verchiel’s breath smelled of spice and decay, and it made Aaron want to gag. He strained his every muscle, to no avail. The Powers’ leader was remarkably strong. The mighty storm winds buffeted them, blowing their bodies about like corks caught in a river current. And still he struggled.
Aaron screamed in rage, tapping into the primal emotion that now coursed through him. He thrashed violently and rammed his head back in a brutal blow to the unsuspecting Verchiel’s face.
It was just enough to loosen the angel’s grip upon him, and Aaron was able to twist his body around. He looked into his attacker’s sneering face, into the eyes of solid black—and in their limitless depths he saw the deaths of thousands.
They were just like him, still children, unaware of the heritage that had marked them for death. Aaron could feel their pain, their desperation, their fear of what they were becoming.
And how was their terror addressed? How were these beings of Heaven and Earth helped to understand their true origins? Only with more horror, as Verchiel and his soldiers came for them. And they were killed, cruelly, methodically, all in the name of God.
Thunder boomed and Aaron freed one of his arms and raked his nails down the angel’s face, snagging one of those horrible, bottomless black eyes. Verchiel shrieked above the wail of the storm, his cry like that of a mournful seabird. He recoiled and grabbed at his injured face.
Aaron pushed himself away from his attacker, pure adrenaline pumping through his body—and something more. He chanced a glance below and saw that his house was on fire and part of the roof had collapsed. His anger intensified and he began to scream, a frightening sound incapable of being produced by human vocal cords.
Verchiel continued his taunts. “And when you are dead, we shall move through this city like a firestorm and everywhere you’ve been, everyone you’ve had even the slightest contact with—all will be washed away in torrents of fire.”
Aaron flew at Verchiel, flaming sword forming in his hand, poised to strike. “You killed them,” he shrieked, remembering the faces of those the angel had slain throughout the ages—as well as his own loved ones.
Verchiel blocked his blows with blinding speed, an evil grin slowly spreading across his pale features. The four bloody furrows Aaron had dug into the angel’s face had already begun to heal.
“Yes, I did, and it is just the beginning,” Verchiel said with an emotionless smile as he fought back with equal savagery. “You are a disease, Aaron Corbet.” Verchiel spat his name as if it were poison on his tongue. “And I will cut from the body of this world all you have infected.”
Aaron dove beneath the angel and went at him from behind. “All this death—,” he began.
Verchiel spun with incredible swiftness. Aaron just managed to duck as the angel’s blade passed over his head. He could feel its heat on his soaking scalp.
“—you do it in the name of God?” Aaron asked incredulously.
“Everything I do,” Verchiel said with a hiss, fury etched into his scarred features, “I do for Him.”
“What kind of god do you serve?” Aaron questioned, struggling to avoid the angel’s thrusts, hoping Verchiel’s anger would make him careless. “What kind of god would allow you to murder innocents in his name?”
Aaron delivered a blow to the angel’s face, rocking his head back and to the side. A wicked thrill went through his body as he watched the angel recoil from the force of his strike. Before the transformation, he wouldn’t have lasted two seconds against this berserk force from Heaven, but now Aaron believed that he could at least give Verchiel something to remember him by.
Verchiel spat blood from his wounded mouth and lunged forward, swinging his blade. His attack was relentless, driving Aaron back and away. Aaron blocked the pitiless descent of the broadsword, the blows so forceful that they began to fragment his own blade, finally causing it to disintegrate in his hand.
“Surrender, monster,” Verchiel said in a voice as smooth as velvet. “It is God’s will.” The angel prepared to cut him in half.
Aaron flexed his wings and propelled himself toward Verchiel, driving his shoulder into the angel’s stomach.
He grabbed Verchiel’s wrist, preventing the sword of fire from descending.
“Is it His wishes you’re following, Verchiel—or yours?” he asked as they struggled within the grip of the storm.
Verchiel brought a knee up and slammed it into Aaron’s side. He felt the air from his lungs explode and his hold upon the angel’s wrist falter.
“I am the leader of the Powers,” he heard Verchiel say over the intensifying weather. “The first of all the hosts to be created by the Allfather.”
Aaron wanted to call up another weapon to defend himself, but the burning pain in his side and lungs barely made it possible for him to stay aloft. He didn’t want to die, to become yet another of the poor souls to fall beneath Verchiel’s sword.
Verchiel came at him, sword in hand. He raised the great blade above his head. “His wishes—my wishes,” he said, eyes wild with bloodlust.
The winds raged, blowing Verchiel back as he prepared to bring the sword down upon Aaron. “They are all one and the same,” he said, straining against the exhalation of nature in turmoil that he had turned loose.
Aaron feebly managed the beginnings of a weapon to continue the struggle, when there was an explosion of sound that seemed to encompass all the heavens. It was a sound Aaron imagined might have been heard at the dawn of creation.
A bolt of lightning arced down from the sky, and he shielded his eyes from the intensity of its resplendence. Like the skeletal finger of some elemental deity composed entirely of crackling blue energy, it roughly tapped the top of Verchiel’s head, as if to show its displeasure.
The angel screeched in pain as the lightning invaded his body, to explode free from the sole of a foot. His body seemed to glow from within, his mouth agape in a scream drowned out by the ruckus of the storm. Verchiel exploded into flames, his body no longer able to contain the raging power coursing through it. And, like Icarus, who had flown too close to the sun, he fell from the sky.
“One and the same—are you sure about that?” Aaron asked Verchiel, watching the blazing form of the Power as it spiraled earthward. Then he turned his attentions to the heavens above.
“Are you really sure?”
Verchiel lay upon his side on the cold, damp ground, wracked by a pain the likes of which he’d never felt before. His body, charred black by the power of the lightning strike, smoldered as it cooled in the evening air.
He rolled onto his back to gaze up at the heavens where his Master resided.
The storm clouds were breaking apart, the angelic magic used to manipulate the weather in all its fury dissipating like wisps of smoke carried away by the wind.
“Why?” he croaked, slowly raising his charred arm, reaching a beckoning hand out to the star-filled night.
But the Creator was silent.
And then they were there, the faithful of his host—those who had survived, looking down upon him, their faces void of emotion. They bent to lift him from the ground, laying the burden of his weight upon their shoulders. And they bore him up into the sky away from the battleground, away from the scene of his most heinous defeat.
“Why?” he asked again, carried closer to the place where his Father dwelled, but still so far that He did not answer.