Archangel's War

28

Elena and Raphael left for China in the pitch-dark hours before daybreak.

The two of them caught the jet to the border of Lijuan’s territory, then dropped out of the specially designed hatch. Raphael went first, so he could catch her if her wings didn’t emerge, the glittering white-gold of his feathers brilliant in the dawn sunlight. The fire had begun to calm down, his wings mostly solid until he wanted them to be otherwise.

The frigid air rushed past her face as she dropped, the sensation of freefall exhilarating until she was brought up short by the lightning storm of her wings. Folding them back, she dropped even farther, Raphael by her side.

Dougal needed to maneuver the jet for his return flight to Japan without worrying about catching them in his drag, and they had to be able to see the details in the landscape.

At first glance, all appeared as it should be: lush green fields, small homes with smoke puffing out the chimneys, angels in the sky. Every single one of those angels acknowledged Raphael when they spotted him. The squadrons that currently patrolled China had been created out of soldiers taken from the armies of all of the Cadre. Including from the two previous Archangels of China.

The vast majority of Favashi’s people had chosen to stay when given the option to stay or go. They were determined to husband the territory for their liege. Lijuan’s people had joined the squadrons for much the same reason. Had to be some tension there, but this was as much their home as it was for Favashi’s people. It helped that they were all ordinary angels. Lijuan had taken her deadly generals and commanders with her.

Population density increased the farther they flew inward. Small villages turned into towns turned into cities. Raphael, I think I should land. Her body was starting to protest the long stretch in the air without a break, but one thing had become clear today: her endurance had increased from pre-chrysalis levels, as had her speed.

On the hill in the distance. It is far from any of the houses. Remember—any sign of illness, and you rise.

Elena made the landing without problem, then refueled with energy drinks and snacks she carried in the pack strapped to her back. It was designed to fit like a normal angel’s pack, flush against her spine. Otherwise her wings would’ve burned right through it, destroying her supplies in the process.

Raphael stayed close by, circling the town at the foot of the hill; Elena could see people scurrying about like ants. That type of scuttling fear? It came from the knowledge an archangel had his eyes on them—which was the whole point of the archangelic patrols: to remind mortals and vampires that the Cadre of Ten had the country in its sights.

The sky crackled with golden lightning that had all movement in the village coming to a quivering standstill.

Putting her hands on her hips, she looked up. Showing off?

A single demonstration can forestall catastrophic bloodshed.

Rested, she pulled her backpack on, then took off with startling ease. As if the more she used these wings, the stronger they got. Weird when there were no muscles involved, but she wasn’t about to look that particular gift horse in the mouth.

I have a theory about the Cascade, she said an hour later, as they crossed a largely uninhabited expanse of rock and shale that was eerily beautiful in its starkness.

I am listening.

Sometimes, you sound so much like an archangel. She had to force the lightness, because just then he hadn’t been playing. The cold and remote edge had been real, his new power pushing constantly to erase the humanity inside him.

It may surprise you to learn that I am, in fact, an archangel.

Elena’s laugh held as much relief as amusement, because that had been her archangel.

At times, he said before she could respond, I feel the cells of your heart inside me. Small pieces of mortality that are so weak, so vulnerable, that they should be eaten up by my immortal blood and yet they endure.

I feel you in me, too. Energy shattered her skin less and less now, but it was there in the background, a constant hum of power. That power tasted of Raphael and it had the Cascade cold to it, but though she could access enough of it to heal, fly, it couldn’t seem to find a clawhold in her, designed as it was for the body of an archangel.

She rode an air current over a field left fallow for the season, the moonscape of rocks now behind them. Raphael swept down beside her and they skimmed the rooftops of a small hamlet where nothing moved. I’m getting creeped out, Archangel.

They are all out in the fields. Look.

A line of hats, bodies bent industriously over a low-height crop. The wind carried across faint sounds of laughter and conversation. Phew.

Tell me your theory of the Cascade.

We decided it isn’t sentient and I haven’t changed my mind on that, but what if it’s driven by the thoughts of sentient beings?

Raphael angled to catch a draft, creating a slipstream for her to ride. She did so until it whispered out, then rejoined him at his side. Who could have such powerful thoughts?

I know it’s an angelic ghost story, but what about those Ancestors said to Sleep below the Refuge? Immortals so old they were beyond time, immortals who had slept through the rise and fall of civilizations, through the birth of mortals and the creation of vampires. Elena had even heard it whispered that they were a different subspecies, an earlier iteration of angelkind. It could be a reset of sorts.

If so, they do it in Sleep so deep they are invisible to our senses. The sun glittered off Raphael’s wings as he swept right. The idea of a reset . . . We are currently in a time of great turbulence. Already, we’re down to only nine in the Cadre. If it is a reset, to what purpose?

I haven’t quite figured that out yet. Elena dug into her jacket pocket for a couple of plain brown hair clips; her damn short hair kept getting into her eyes. She should’ve listened to Ransom and worn a headband but ugh, they made her think of the torture of junior high.

The sea washed into her mind again as she clipped back the worst offenders. There is another option.

Gee, you’re not sounding scary at all right now.

What if the Ancestors are real and this Cascade is so violent because they are waking?

Elena’s throat dried up. That wouldn’t be good would it?

They are said to be so powerful they built our world. They could as easily destroy it.

Nice cheery ghost story. Thanks Mr. Guild Hunter.

Raphael laughed and they flew on, taking in everything around them and resting when Elena needed it. This was only the first of multiple flights they’d be doing across the country. At no point, however, would they be staying in China. The jet would drop them off at different points through the country. It would then return to pick them up in the air.

If necessary, the two of them would stay nights in the territories that bordered China, those archangels having agreed to the arrangement, but actually being resident in China, even with wildfire rampant in Raphael, was a risk too far.

It was as they were reaching the far point of the day’s quadrant that they overflew a village of silence and stillness. No people in the fields. No dogs excitedly playing with children in the streets. No smoke rising from hearths even though with the sun setting in a blaze of soft reds and lush pinks, the world had become noticeably colder.

Jason marked this ghost village in his reconnaissance map. It was one of the first he discovered. Raphael’s voice was the sea on a bitingly cold day, shards of ice forming on the surface.

She embraced the sensation, accepting who he was and who he was becoming. I want to land, look around. When his expression turned to granite, she said, I’ve already done it multiple times with no ill-effects.

None of those times were in a village devoid of life. Lijuan’s poison may be soaked into every inch of dirt, every square meter of every home. Raphael continued to circle the eerily silent village after making that point.

But Elena wasn’t done. I think there are things going on below that one of us needs to see. Jason’s last surveillance flight over this area was probably a while ago. The spymaster had spies all across China, but they couldn’t see everything.

If we land, we do it together.

Elena’s abdomen clenched. The poison is aimed at archangels, she reminded him, desperate to keep him off the land that had infected one archangel already; Raphael had given her all the dreadful details of how the contagion had turned Favashi into an adjunct of Lijuan. I have strange DNA that—

No, Elena. No give in his tone. We cannot allow Lijuan to dictate to us from beyond Sleep. And if I am vulnerable to her, I must discover it now, before she rises in battle.

Shit. She couldn’t exactly argue with that—because if Lijuan had become immune to wildfire, the entire world was fucking screwed. Let’s do it.

Their boots hit the earth moments later. Dust swirled up around them as Raphael folded back his wings. Elena retracted hers, and the two of them began to walk through the village accompanied by the sound of nothing. No life. Not even a squawking chicken or irritated cricket.

Spotting an open door, Elena knocked. “Hello? I don’t mean you any harm,” she called out in the very basic Mandarin Chinese she’d learned in the weeks before their departure. Mostly greetings and phrases like this one that she’d thought might be needed.

But her nose told her that attempting communication was a vain effort: abandonment had a dull, musty odor it was impossible to mistake. The taste of it coated the back of her throat as thickly as the dust that caked everything in sight.

She walked all the way inside.

Charred pot on the stove. Looks like it was left on until the element burned out.

The table is set in this home, Raphael replied from another part of the street. The food on the plates has petrified under mold.

The two of them checked multiple buildings, even a barn, and a garage where a car sat up on blocks with its bonnet raised, but aside from the unnerving lack of people and animals, there was nothing unusual to see. No mummified bodies, no indications of burials. It was as if the entire village had simply vanished in a single heartbeat.

Taking off in pensive quiet, their boot prints immortalized in the dust until the next wind, they turned to the right. Their flight path would take them over new territory before they met up with the jet. Below them passed more green fields and rural villages. The light was fading but hadn’t yet affected visibility. Which was why unusual motion below caught Elena’s eye.

There’s something odd about those villagers. She couldn’t quite make out the details from their current altitude, so she dropped lower. They’re all moving like old people. No village this big was occupied only by the elderly.

She descended farther . . . and horror curdled her stomach. Shrunken and emaciated faces. Bodies of bone in a skin bag. Shuffling movements, limbs being dragged.

We land. Raphael went down first, Elena right after him.

The shuffling villagers didn’t react at all.

Everyone who wasn’t an archangel reacted to Raphael.

Elena caught the gaze of a nearby woman. Her eyeballs gleamed wet in a hollow bone frame. Pity and a need to render aid overwhelmed the cold bite of fear. “We’re here to help.”

No response.

“Raphael, do you speak the dialect in this region?”

Yes. I lived in China for two decades long ago. But the woman just stared blankly at him before shambling past. She was pushing a small cart, the type of thing on which you might carry vegetables or other goods you were taking to market.

Not far from them, a man banged a hammer up and down on a piece of wood, as if building something. Except he’d been banging at the same piece of wood since they’d landed. It was splintering, the nail long since embedded.

“It is as the courtier reported to my mother—they are going through motions so well learned that they are instinct.” An arctic gaze, the blue a cold chrome. “Nothing but the most primordial part of their minds remain.”

Elena struggled with the ethics of what she was about to say, finally made the choice. “Check, make sure.” She’d asked him to never again invade a mortal mind, but what if these people were trapped and screaming within? The only person who might be able to hear them was an archangel.

“There is nothing there,” Raphael said in a matter of seconds, his expression flat. “Broken sparks of memories that are already fading. No sense of personhood. No awareness of the outside world or of others as living creatures. Even a badly damaged mortal mind has a sense of personality; here, there is only a blank slate. I will see if any others are different.”

They weren’t. Vampire or human, all were empty.

Nausea twisted Elena’s intestines. “If the Cascade had won, I’d be like this, an empty shell with no soul.”

“Such an abomination would’ve never walked the world. I would’ve kept my promise.”

Yes, he would have. Even though it would’ve destroyed him. Elena went to brush her hand over his wing in a silent apology when it struck her. “Archangel.” Cold sweat along her spine, her leg muscles suddenly rigid. “Where are the children?”

Every single one of the shambling skeletons around them was an adult.