Baptisms of Fire and Ice Read online

  A terrible thought struck her.

  What if the intruder was another monster, a bigger and badder one, come to avenge its fallen comrade?

  But if that was the case, she still needed to check and see before she panicked and fled out a window. She wasn’t abandoning her apartment over an unfounded fear. This was the only safe place she had in the entire city, now that Enzo’s apartment was nothing but ash. If she ended up on the street, the street where monsters roamed, some of them human and some of them not, her odds of surviving this ordeal in one piece would drop real fast.

  “Try to drive me out of my home,” she whispered, raising her gun as she approached the door, “and you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  Moving as quietly as possible, she brought her eye to the peephole. At first, she saw nothing but blinding white light, as if someone was shining a flashlight beam directly into the peephole. But as she peeled her eyes, a humanoid shape resolved in the middle of the light, and she realized that the person wasn’t wielding a flashlight. They were glowing.

  Specifically, the folded wings sticking out from the person’s back were glowing. The reason they were glowing was because they weren’t made of fluffy feathers. Rather, they were made of thousands of symbols constructed entirely of wavering energy pulses that danced in time to an unheard beat and crawled over one another like a colony of frenzied ants.

  At last, Adara’s eyes adjusted fully to the bright light, and she found herself staring at a young man. He was decked out in a white robe, a set of light, metallic armor, and an honest-to-god short sword. He was tall and willowy, with curly blond hair and pale-blue eyes, and Adara would’ve called him handsome. Were it not for the massive, bloody, bone-deep gash running across his face from temple to chin and completely bisecting his nose.

  Adara gasped at the gory sight.

  And the winged man heard her.

  The man bent toward the peephole and stared back through it, searching for her. He said in a wet, raspy voice, his lips stained with blood, his tone tinged with desperation, “Open the door, my lady. Open it now. I need to speak with you in private, and we don’t have a lot of time. The powers below sensed you when you used your god shard earlier, same as we did up above, and they know where you are. They are coming here, right now, and if they arrive before I finish telling you what you need to know, your whole world will burn. So please, let me in. Please!”

  Adara slowly backed away from the door, her mind refusing to parse a single word of what this glowing man had just said. “What are you?” was her only response.

  The man let out an exasperated breath and replied, “I am an angel of the Heavenly Host, and I bring you dreadful tidings. Heaven has lost the war with Hell, and Hell now marches for the Earth.”

  Chapter Nine

  Adara heaved the door open and shoved the end of her shotgun against the winged man’s chest. “Explain,” she demanded. “Explain everything you just said in a way that actually makes sense.”

  The man didn’t seem intimidated by the cold touch of the gun against his thin white robe. He glanced at the barrel and tracked it up to her slightly shaking hands, before his gaze settled on her own. Behind the despair in his watery blue eyes lurked an emotion akin to pride. Adara could have sworn he puffed out his chest, pressing his pec harder against the end of the shotgun’s barrel.

  A challenge. A dare for her to pull the trigger and see what happened when the force of a point-blank birdshot blast met the flesh of a creature not of this world.

  Adara didn’t bite. “I’m not putting the gun away, not after all the crap I’ve been through today. But I’m not going to shoot you on a whim either. So whatever demonstration of ‘heavenly power’ you’re cooking up, save it for later. For now, how about you do as I ask and tell me why the hell you’ve been banging on my door? Hm? How about that?”

  The so-called angel huffed indignantly. “I will tell you everything you need to know, my lady, but I cannot do so from your balcony. The truths I must speak are not meant for the ears of the bystanders in this brewing war, but rather for the participants.”

  Adara gathered that he wanted her to let him inside her apartment. She frowned. “I thought you said the war had been lost already.”

  “The war between Heaven and Hell is over, yes. But the war between Earth and Hell has just begun.”

  The conviction in his voice shot a chill up her spine in a manner not dissimilar to the skittering of a centipede. A hundred spindly legs pricking at her nerves. “And why should I trust you enough to let you into my apartment? For all I know, you’re a demon in disguise, and you need my permission to cross the threshold or something, so that you can get your hands on me and drag me to Hell.”

  The angel man’s energy feathers ruffled at the suggestion he was anything but divine. Galled, he said, “While I understand your wariness, my lady—”

  “Adara.”

  “—Lady Adara, we really do not have the luxury of time. So if you do not let me in of your own volition, I will subdue you, silence you, and force you to listen to me. I have this day witnessed hundreds of my brothers and sisters fall in combat to the foulest fiends of Hell, and to put it in a human way, I am not currently ‘in the mood’ for defiance, reticence, or the other human nonsense that tends to crop up in those faced with aspects of reality that defy their flawed beliefs. So let me in, or else.”

  With each word he spoke, his wings unfurled an inch, until they were fully extended. They stretched the entire length of her balcony and then some. Two glittering arches of scurrying symbols that gleamed brighter than any neon sign. They impressed upon Adara a message of awesome power that permeated every corner of her mind, ringing like a massive bell, shaking to pieces what little confidence she had possessed when she opened the door.

  Her eyes began to ache just from looking at the man’s golden visage, and she dropped her head. “All right. Fine. I’ll let you in. But one wrong move, and I will shoot you, angel or not.”

  “Understood,” the man said coolly.

  Adara turned at an angle that didn’t put her back to the man, and waved him into the foyer with her gun. The man folded his wings enough to fit through the doorway and stepped inside. He briefly scanned the interior of the apartment. But whatever judgment he made, if any, could not be read beneath the sorrow in his eyes and the grimace of pain constantly tugging at his lips.

  Adara closed the door behind him and locked it tight. She didn’t want any more uninvited guests to waltz in while she was having a chat with a man who had magic wings that shone like the sun. She couldn’t imagine his presence had gone unnoticed by all her neighbors, especially after that birdlike plumage display. He was a literal shining beacon for a minute there.

  Well, if the ugly monster and any friends he might have didn’t know where I was before, she thought wryly, they certainly do now.

  The angel man strode over to her living area and lowered himself onto a reclining chair Adara had purchased at a yard sale last year. The cushion was worn in the middle, and the man sank deeply into it. So deeply that it was clear his wings possessed a great deal of weight that betrayed his otherwise lithe appearance.

  He took an extra moment to situate himself in the chair so that he could lean against the back cushion and maintain his ramrod-straight posture. As he was adjusting himself, Adara finally grasped the reason why he was moving in such a sluggish, methodical fashion.

  The angel was hurt. Badly.

  Between the glowing wings and the disfiguring facial laceration, Adara had been so distracted that she hadn’t bothered to examine the rest of the man in great detail. Now that her awe over the wings was ebbing, and the horror of the gory gash was being filed away for a later nightmare, she finally took a good look at the man from the neck down.

  He was a mess. His robe was dyed brown and red from repeated encounters with blood, and there were a few orange stains that matched the blood from the little boar monster. The fabric of the robe was also torn in nu
merous places. Several of the frayed holes were large enough to reveal that the man had been repeatedly stabbed with some kind of cylindrical weapon that had left an array of disturbingly deep bore marks.

  About half the man’s wounds were scabbed over, but the others were still fresh and bloody. The worst were so large that they allowed Adara to peer straight into the man’s abdominal and chest cavities. She could see one of his lungs moving in time with each haggard breath that racked his chest.

  “Christ, you need to be in surgery right now, not in my living room,” she said, her distrust in the man shifting to the backburner in favor of concern. “Should I call an ambulance, or do you have some kind of angel medics?”

  The man smiled sadly. “Anything that does not kill an angel will eventually heal on its own. We do not need medical attention to the same degree that humans do, as we do not contract disease, and our wounds do not heal poorly if let unattended.”

  “Oh, so you’re…okay?”

  “That depends in what sense you are using the word okay.” He sighed deeply, and winced, the fall of his chest having tugged at one of his wounds. “But really, Lady Adara, I am not here to discuss my well-being, or lack thereof. We have much more important things to speak about. And we are, as you would put it, ‘on the clock.’”

  Adara opened her mouth to respond, but he held up his hand and continued, “I will relay to you the entire story in a condensed form that contains all the relevant details you need to know. While I’m recounting this tale, I request that you pack all your vital belongings in bags that are easy to carry. Once our adversaries arrive, you will not be able to return to this place for some time without great risk to your life. So, please, gather everything you need in one place, and I will begin the story as you begin to pack.”

  Adara’s throat was suddenly as dry as sandpaper. “I have to leave?”

  “You leave, or you die,” the angel said. “I cannot protect you from what is coming, though I will do my best to stall it.”

  “What is coming?” she dared to ask.

  “A greater demon, and a significant number of his lesser minions.” He peered over his shoulder at the window that overlooked the balcony, and she got the distinct impression he could see straight through the shade. “Hurry up now, Lady Adara. They are near.”

  That same sense of detachment that had strangled her mind after the impact event fell over her again like a thick blanket, and Adara started to move on autopilot. She set her shotgun on the side table next to the couch, walked to the kitchenette, and grabbed all the lightweight nonperishable food she had on her shelves. Dropping it off on the carpet in the living area, she then hurried to the closet that held her hiking supplies and emptied it of practically everything.

  A hiking pack. A hunting bow. A quiver full of arrows. A sleeping bag. Two high-powered flashlights. A four-pack of small camping lanterns. A compact tool kit. A first-aid kit. A sewing kit. A set of knives. A set of lighters with extra fluid.

  The box of birdshot shells. An unopened box of buckshot shells. A high-visibility yellow raincoat. Three boxes full of emergency rations that would last till the end of the century.

  And the list went on.

  Once she had everything from her hiking closet out and organized on the floor, she jogged to her other closet in the bedroom area and picked five shirts, three pairs of jeans, an unopened eight-pack of underwear, and four sports bras. After she checked each article of clothing to make sure nothing had holes or damaged seams, she rolled up all the clothes and secured them with rubber bands to minimize the amount of space they’d take up in her pack.

  When that was done, she grabbed another outfit from her closet, plus her sturdiest pair of boots, and got dressed. Up until this point, she’d been conversing with an angel while wearing nothing but a tank top and undies. I must’ve looked so intimidating when I answered the door in a tiny pink shirt and a powder-blue pair of boy shorts.

  Now in appropriate attire to speak with an angel of the Heavenly Host, she dropped off the rest of the clothes at the supply pile on the carpet and made one last trip, to the bathroom, to collect the necessary toiletries. Including her hairbrush, toothbrush, hair bows, shampoo, toothpaste, soap, menstrual pads, and tampons.

  There was no way to hide the tampon and pad packaging as she arranged the toiletries on the carpet. But either the angel didn’t notice them, or unlike a lot of the men Adara had dated in the past, he didn’t care about the things women used to stem the tide of period blood.

  “That’s everything. I’ll start packing now, so you can start talking.” Adara began stuffing all of her supplies into her large hiking pack in the same practiced manner she’d learned from her father when she was all of eight years old. The packing procedure was so second nature to her now that Adara didn’t even need to look at the pack as she worked.

  Instead, she focused on the blood-soaked angel as he told her a terrible tale of loss, a loss so great that the world might never recover from the devastation.

  Chapter Ten

  “Heaven has been at war with Hell since humans were nothing but a twinkle in the Creator’s eye,” he began in a solemn tone. “And for all of that time, those countless millennia, centuries of strife and struggle blurred together in our collective memory, the war has been a complete and utter stalemate.

  “We would gain some ground against the forces of Hell, and they would take it back. They would gather some ground against the forces of Heaven, and we would take it back. Around and around we went, victory always the same great distance away, so far off for so long that many of us in Heaven became complacent, assumed that war with Hell would simply be our way of life until the universe ceased to exist.”

  The man closed his eyes and exhaled loudly. “That complacency was our downfall. Unbeknownst to us, the greater demons of Hell and their lord and master, Lucifer, hatched a plan some centuries ago. A daring plan. The most ambitious plan ever conceived by any being other than the Creator Themselves. So ambitious that none of us in Heaven would have ever guessed, in our wildest nightmares, that our enemies would attempt such a thing.

  “Because, if this plan were to go wrong, it would destroy all of Creation. Heaven. Hell. Earth. All of reality, gone in an instant.” He scowled for a quiet moment, and then added ruefully, “We underestimated our enemies’ exhaustion. They were so tired of fighting the war, they were in fact willing to risk the existence of everything just to defeat us. Because even if they failed, at least the war would be over.”

  The man raised a hand to his bloody face and touched the ragged edge of the deep gash that marred his handsome features. “We misjudged the depth of their desperation, and now we are the ones left desperate and bereft.”

  Adara paused with a small can of baked beans in her hand. “What happened exactly?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t quite know how to explain it in a way that a human will understand. The exact methodology that went into the scheme is immeasurably complex, and far beyond the principles of what humans have achieved in your modern science and mathematics. To put it in the simplest terms, Lucifer and his generals discovered a way to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe in the dimensional plane in which the bulk of the Creator’s Providence existed.”

  Adara set the can next to the others in her pack. “Providence? What is that?”

  “Essentially, Providence is the body of the Creator. Or rather, it was the body. An accumulation of energy and will and intent that encompassed the physical universe to its outer bounds and influenced every event that occurred within the universe, from here on Earth to the farthest reaches of the oldest galaxies to the emptiest pockets of space where the echoes of Creation’s birth still resonate.”

  “So what you’re saying is that God’s body was…nuked by the forces of Hell?” Adara quickened her packing speed. She was getting overwhelmed by the concepts being discussed, and she needed something repetitive to even out her thoughts before she had some kind of meltdown and her bra
in shut off altogether.

  The angel nodded. “That is a reasonable metaphor, though it doesn’t quite grasp the scale of the devastation of Providence.”

  “But essentially, it all boils down to the fact that God’s dead? The forces of Hell killed God and defeated the angels in Heaven, and now they’re going to try to take over the Earth?”

  “If the Creator could die the way a human dies, then this would all be much simpler, and the outcome much more hopeless.” He tugged at his golden curls in a manner that implied he was struggling to figure out how to explain the grand cosmic mechanisms behind the nature of God’s existence. He eventually settled on: “Picture Providence like a sculpture made of glass. When the attack came, it was somewhat like a large hammer striking the glass and shattering it into a million tiny pieces. With so much force that those pieces were jettisoned from the natural plane of Providence and onto the physical plane, where Earth exists.”

  A can of soup slipped from Adara’s fingers and rolled across the carpet, thumping against the base of the TV stand. “Holy shit. Are you telling me the impact event was…was pieces of God raining down from the sky?”

  “Unfortunately, yes,” the angel said.

  Adara reached over her shoulder and prodded the place on her back marked by the star-shaped bruise. “I was already not liking this story, but I have a feeling I’m going to hate the next part.”

  “I’m afraid so.” He gave her a wan smile. “As you have already inferred, the pieces of Shattered Providence fell upon the Earth this very day. Some of those pieces struck the ground and were absorbed by the soil. Some struck plant life and became intertwined with those basic forces of growth that characterize all flora. Some struck animals and merged with the more vigorous spiritual energies of those complex organisms. And finally, some of the shards of Providence struck humans and bonded with their souls.”