Conquer the Dark (5 page)

“Imhotep was a genius,” Bath Kol said, pressing on for Celeste, “and member of the Light Remnant, just like those other dudes in the Good Book that lived seven to eight hundred years. But since Imhotep came before them, his skeleton was dipped in gold to protect the DNA in his marrow and to make his Light energy in that DNA more conductive—enough so that with his bones and the prayers from the crystal tablet, recited on the winter solstice, which is the darkest day of the year on the planet, December twenty-first, the reanimation energy can be focused. That focused energy will allow the dead soldiers from battlefields past to be able to get up and fight again. Houston, we’ve got a problem if the dark side gets the crystal book of resurrection tablets to go with a Light Remnant’s bones. Dark Remnants’ bones can’t reanimate and of course we’ve hidden the tombs of all of the Remnants of Light, but Imhotep is one of the most powerful they could have found.”

Bath Kol turned to Isda and crossed his arms and lifted his chin. “And, again, that’s the reason I was lobbying to head to Egypt, to find the book before the dark side does.”

“But how did a freaking crystal tablet book get lost?” Celeste was out of her seat at the table on and her feet. “Seriously!”

“Human free will, ma. That’s the risk of dealing with ’em. You think you know people, then something spooks ’em, or they think they’re getting a better deal from the other side … a kid gets held hostage and they break, or they just plain get tricked, whatever. We try to keep tabs on ’em, but, hey, those of us down here can’t be everywhere at once—and once some of our secrets fall into the wrong hands, if they block out etheric vision from the Light, just like we can block theirs coming from the dark, what can you do?” Isda said with a shrug, going to the refrigerator. “Anybody else want a brew while I’m over here? My stomach is too messed up now for breakfast this morning.”

“Yeah,” Azrael muttered, walking over toward Isda and extending a hand to accept a bottle. “Isda, I would have thought after twenty-six thou, you would be used to last-minute missions across the globe.”

“The man has jokes.” Isda popped his bottle cap and clinked his longneck beer against Azrael’s. “You never get used to the drill … and remember, the last time we were travelin’ light. No humans. No females. All immortals. And you ain’t been here for that full monty, mon. I’ve got a right to be hoppin,’ spittin’, cussin’ mad. You have no idea what it was like all this time in the temporal zone—and you’ve jus’ been here three short months, found your Remnant on day one … unheard of. So give some of us battle-weary brothers a break, if we ain’t exactly all gung-ho.”

Azrael nodded. “Point taken.”

“Thank you,” Isda said in a churlish tone. “We can walk tru’ da ether and be in Egypt before lunch. To travel wit dem is a hazard, mon. No offense. First we gotta get phony passports, get ’em tickets, get ’em tru’ security and patted down and on a flight. Twelve, thirteen hours later they land. Then they gotta rest, gotta eat. Plus being female Remnants in a city of twenty million beings that are still in what you might as well call a civil war, some of whom are looking for what we’re looking for, is not a good t’ing. So, I’m not hating or being melodramatic. All I was
trying
to tell BK is that we needed to send a reconnaissance team over there—and I was arguing about not going with the most precious cargo we’ve got in tow. But he says to leave them behind with a weaker security team is leaving them like sitting ducks for a snatch and grab—and I feel him on dat, too. It’s a rock and-a-hard-place setup.”

“When was the last time we had a visual on all the elements of the vault?” Azrael looked from Bath Kol to Isda and back.

Bath Kol rubbed the nape of his neck. “Okay, I admit it; I haven’t been the brightest bulb in the pack, all right. My light was dimming until you came down here three months ago and found Celeste. That battle on the waterfront was a V my spirit needed.”

Azrael released an impatient breath. “When was the last time?”

“A few years ago, when an old priest in Turkey had a vision. He took the crystal book of tablets out of Egypt when a bunch of bull kicked off in the Middle East. But I know somehow he or someone he confided in got it back
there. I feel it in my bones, guys.” Bath Kol rubbed his neck again. “The old man was cool, just like all our shamans and priests and priestesses in the past that we gave the gift of discernment to—he was clean, man. The old man saw a premonition of the dark side taking the sarcophagus, prayed so he could mentally shoot the image of the abduction he witnessed to our side to alert us, and then preempted them and hid it on hallowed ground. The old dude was incredible. He maneuvered getting both the book and the sacred sarcophagus moved to a safe place, even at his frail human age—and for a long time, it seems, no one was the wiser about his stealth moves.”

“You say when bull kicked off in the Middle East?” Isda said incredulously. “What fucking era, mon? Excuse my French in fronta de ladies. A few years ago could be the 1960s, 1940s, or two thousand years ago!”

“The man said to watch your language,” Bath Kol muttered, using his beer to point at Isda. “You know how the years run together down here, okay, so don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house. Like you were always vigilant—never smoked a tree, never—”

“All right, gentlemen!” Azrael shouted, quelling the brewing dispute. “That’s how this got out of control before. The point is, where is the old man now?”

“Father Krespy passed on … like in 1982. He was well into his eighties when he had the tablet, and then his young apprentice, an Egyptian Muslim who was working with the old priest as an interfaith protégé priest, Daoud Salahuddin, took it to keep it on the move. Again, why I said looking in Egypt is a sound strategy.”

“BK, 1982 was just prior to the Harmonic Convergence,”
Aziza said with a horrified whisper. “Before the period shifted to the time of Light.”

“Yeah, the dark side was hunting down everybody who had Light consciousness in their spirits around that time, making people sick, making them die suddenly, you name it. They knew that if they didn’t cull our human ranks of Light-bearers, when the shift came, we’d be stronger and have better access to keep the human vibration high and positive. That’s the last thing the dark side wanted, was for regular human Joes to be thinking, reasonable, humane individuals. They want war, ignorance, bigotry, fear, strife, yada yada yada. So knocking off good world leaders, community organizers, people in the trenches holding the Light, was their dealio. Always has been. But there was a definite uptick in the dark side’s activities just before the Convergence.”

“C’mon, man … that was like almost thirty years ago, and it didn’t dawn on you to give us a heads-up?” Gavreel looked around the room and headed toward the refrigerator.

“You know, BK,” Paschar said in a tight voice, “that’s saying a lot to send the angel in charge of peace to get a beer because you’ve caused him to
lose it
.”

“Nineteen eighty-two?” Gavreel said, then opened his beer and began to pace.

“Yeah, that’s right about the time I started drinking,” Bath Kol said, heading to the refrigerator for another beer. “You all have no idea what I see in my sleep and all day long.”

Azrael closed his eyes and spoke in a low rumble. “Then how do we know it’s not too late?”

“Because if they had it, they would have been back to kick our asses already,” Celeste said slowly, sitting.

“It was cool,” Bath Kol said, taking a swig from his bottle. “It was with a vetted apprentice who’d taken over for the old priest. How many times do you think the library has changed hands over twenty-six thousand years, brothers? Gimme a break. Humans last these days—what? like three score or seventy years or whatever? I forget. So caretakers change hands. Get over it. The point is, our guys up in the etheric realms sound the alarm through my visions if we’re in imminent danger of a real threat. Most of the time, the terror level is on yellow,” he added, looking at the women at the table.

After releasing an impatient breath, Bath Kohl rubbed the nape of his neck. “But this morning, I got a real warning at a red level basically—all right, folks? The dark side finally found the bones that were kept separately from the crystal book of tablets. They found Imhotep’s bones after all these years. So, the last thing we have time for is arguing amongst ourselves. And I’m
the last
person who feels like doing sand and tombs at a hundred twenty degrees in the shade, okay? But it is what it is. We have to go to Egypt and dig for where the guys on our side may have hidden the book. It’s out there in the desert in that hot, dusty, sandy, chaotic place going through a regime change. Hey, that’s not my fault, just the facts—so don’t shoot the messenger.”

Celeste’s Remnant sisters reached out their hands and squeezed hers, adding Aziza in the ring, all sharing nervous glances as they sat at the table. But just as Celeste was about to pull away, a blue-white charge slowly covered
her fists, seeming to run through the length of the other women’s outstretched arms.

“The thing that is so sick is the dark side has created a full-scale blackout of the entire region, jamming vision frequencies from our side.” Bath Kol tossed his old bottle into a recycling bin with a crash and reached into the fridge to open a new cold one. “That interference covers North and East Africa all the way through the Middle East, and forget trying to see into the Holy Land at this point. We’ve got them blocked, they’ve got us blocked—the stalemate is so ridiculous that neither side can really see what’s going on over there, which goes back to my original point of needing actual boots on the ground to get the intel we need.”

“Daoud never left Cairo with it,” Celeste murmured, then looked up at Azrael. “It’s fuzzy, but I just don’t think he left the area.”

“Whoa, our locator can see past the dark side’s barriers when she’s joined by the power of three?” Bath Kol said in hushed awe. “Who freakin’ knew? But it makes so much sense.”

Just like that, their
fate had been sealed. She and the ladies were flying to Egypt. Cloaked angels would be guarding the plane in the air, an advance team would walk through the ether to prepare the way on the ground, and their individual protector mates would be at their sides for the interminable, twelve-hour, nonstop flight.

Celeste blew a stray curl up off her forehead as she grabbed a section of folded T-shirts from her drawer and
brought them over to her small, carry-on suitcase. This was so not how she’d planned to spend her day.

Logistics had been decided by edict; when Azrael was stressed, he didn’t do management by committee well. A small contingent of angel warriors would remain in Philly to scout out a new location. Their role was to thoroughly equip the new barracks with artillery, protective prayer barriers, as well as living necessities, while an advance guard led by Isda would walk point in Egypt, clearing the path for hotel accommodations, transportation connections, and any mundane human issues that could get in the way.

Meanwhile, cloaked angels would escort their Air Egypt flight the way F-16 fighter jets escorted Air Force One. Azrael, Gavreel, Paschar, and Bath Kol would sit beside the three Remnants and the one sensitive like federal air marshals guarding VIPs, all without regular humans ever being the wiser.

Celeste shook her head the more she thought about it. If average travelers only knew … The flight they were booked on was probably the safest flight heading to that region that had ever left the ground.

Still, that didn’t stop her from worrying about what could happen once they touched down. She knew they had to find the crystal book. She knew they had to somehow secret it away. But that didn’t explain what she and her three “special” sisters were specifically supposed to do.

How were they going to tip the balance and turn on the Light within humanity’s growing darkness? Ignorance was so pervasive; the American airwaves were polluted by propaganda! No real news, no authentic journalism, was left; only talking heads that did the bidding
of greedy corporations. One dark-souled billionaire alone had been allowed to buy up television stations, radio stations, newspapers, magazines, and even a movie studio. The havoc only one human being had wreaked on the national consciousness was staggering—all it took was one powerful person without a moral compass to hire talking heads who would do his bidding. From there it was all downhill; the public as sheep were basically led to their slaughter, spouting rhetoric and talking points that they regurgitated from charlatans without true understanding. Mob rule was created, civility was gone, and the dark side had won the public relations war.

So what
the hell
could
she
do? She was just one person.

“That’s just it,” Azrael said calmly, drawing her attention to the bedroom-suite door. “He is just one man aided by the forces of darkness.”

“The guy who bought up seventy-five percent of the airwaves is
a billionaire
,” she replied, always amazed at how Azrael appeared just when she needed his calm wisdom most, but was never intrusive about the open-mind link they now shared.