Michael (The Mark) (The Airel Saga, Book 4: Part 7-8) (20 page)

CHAPTER IX

I STOOD ON THE ground slack-jawed, looking at something impossible.

A bolt of pure light, evidence of heaven, shot straight up into the sky.

Kreios.

I spoke my grandfather’s name in awe: “Kreios.”

When I first saw him blasting through the atmosphere on a trail of light, my heart took to flight as well. I remembered his training, that love is the most powerful force in the universe. Indeed, love was all I
could
feel when I saw my grandfather. It was an awesome thing to see him take to the skies.

I let the waves of emotion roll over me. I allowed my heart to roam free in the excitement of knowing that my grandfather was still alive, that I might soon be reunited with him, that he might soon learn the truth about me—that I, too, was still alive. I had to get to him.

I realized then in my reverie that I had closed my eyes.

I opened them to discover that I was more than twenty feet above the pavement.

What the heck?

Thankfully,
She
interrupted my alarmed thoughts.
“Concentrate.”

I obliged, wide-eyed. I thought of the last thing I could remember before I found myself hovering above the street.
Kreios.
I was thinking about seeing him again. Our reunion. I stared at the horizon, at the vertical line described by my grandfather’s incredible flight through the air.

I glanced down. I was now more than one hundred feet above the ground, in the darkness of the predawn sky.
Whoa.
My mind calculated things I hadn’t needed before. It made accurate tallies of altitude with a glance, brought me trajectories and g-force loads and sharpened my vision incredibly. While I was taking it all in,
She
interrupted me again.

“Change of plans. Kreios needs you more than Michael does right now.”

I was a gigantic question mark inside.
What?

“Use the Sword. Defend your family. Airel, you were born for this. Awaken.”

Something inside me took hold. It was beyond thought or explanation. It just was. The word she used—
Awaken
—was perfect. I felt like every part of me, both human and angelic, once mere averages and mostly asleep, were now wide awake and aware of everything in my environment.

Wideawake.
That’s what I was. It struck me that there simply was no such thing as coincidence anymore.

My eyes, once wide with new realization, now narrowed into the hard countenance of the warrior. Whatever had happened,
She
was dead right. I could do this.

I concentrated on one thing: speed.

If I could have seen myself, I might have fainted. I was starting to come into my own. The awakening process, much different from mere activation, had given me my wings. I couldn’t see them, but I could feel them. With that change had come new powers of observation, like altitude and airspeed over ground, stuff like that. But I had also gained a new set of eyelids. It sounds gross, but they were cool. They slid down to protect my eyes from the sheer force of the wind rushing against them in flight. They were a little like those nighttime driving glasses, only far cooler and much more useful. They sharpened my sight, protected my eyes, illuminated everything.

I was definitely coming into my own.

I focused on where I needed to be, straight ahead ten miles and about twenty thousand feet straight up. I set my jaw and leaned forward.

I was gone, out of there.

***

THE SPEED I GAINED came quickly. Before I knew it, I was passing five hundred miles per hour and still accelerating. I was going to go supersonic. I looked ahead, toward Kreios, trying to concentrate on flying.
Flying.

A few seconds later there was a big boom, and everything went quiet. I was outrunning sound itself.

I stole a glance backward. Behind me was a trail of pure blue light.

***

KREIOS WAS BECOMING DESPERATE. He was getting very close to the edge of what he could handle. He would soon plummet to the earth, out of control, easy pickings for the Nri vultures. He closed his eyes and fixed his heart completely on El now.

“Though He slay me, yet I will hope in Him.”

Kreios flamed out. He was out of energy, spent. He curled up and fell. It would not be long until the Nri intercepted him and tore him to pieces. There were no questions. There was no why. Whatever happened now would happen, and he would be at peace with it.

With this thought, shadows closed in upon his mind. He thought of his beautiful wife. He had told her thousands of years ago that they would be reunited. He longed to fulfill that promise. Perhaps now…

***

I WAS GETTING CLOSE. I could see clearly from one mile away that Kreios was falling. It looked like he was out of control.
What is he doing?

“He needs your help.”

Kreios tumbled as if unconscious. A skinny demon with wings much too big for its body took a swipe at Kreios, grabbing him for a moment. I gasped and watched as he tossed my grandfather like a rag doll to another demon, much larger, who then turned back toward the earth.

I knew what to do. If my grandfather was a fearsome warrior, so was I. If he had killed his ten thousands of demonic infidels—which I knew from my own study was a word that meant “unfaithful”—then I too could, and I would. I thought of the Sword.

It sprang instantly to hand.

I opened my mouth to shout. The battle cry that came out shook the very skies. It was a shriek terrible to witness, sounding like a hawk diving for the kill …only I was ascending into the midst of a black cloud of Nri demons.

“This is the entire Nri horde,” She
said.

They should have thought twice,
I responded.

I did not see the masses of Nri wings and talons, just Kreios. He was my grandfather, he needed me, and I would not let him die.

On my first pass through their airborne mob, I sent one hundred and forty-two of them to hell.

I circled back around for more.

Kreios was still in the grip of the demon who had last grasped him—only most of that demon was gone. All that remained of it was a severed leg. The Sword was doing its job. The limb burst into ash, and my grandfather was free. But still falling.

Now at twenty thousand feet up, before Kreios fell to his death, I had quite simply a crapload of demons to kill. I faced the Nri horde alone, the Sword blazing in my hand.

CHAPTER X

KREIOS BEGAN TO FEEL something new. Rushing wind in his ears. The sensation of falling. He was not dead; he would not awaken to see his beloved bride.
Not yet.

He opened his eyes. He was still alive and falling.

The drain … it was ebbing away. What was it he felt now? Vague, but familiar. It was like the Sword of Light, only different. It was profound; it felt so similar to his beloved old weapon, yet it was clearly
not
somehow. He looked at his hands. They were empty. He felt it, though. The drain had stopped.

He was gaining strength.

He could fly again.

He corrected his descent and shot into the air, feeling all his strength beginning to return; he was being filled with power.
El?

“Just watch.”

Then he saw what El was talking about. A blue streak cutting through the Nri horde. It was supersonic, and an attendant pure white light went with it. A great number of Nri demons were struck in the collision and began the long fall back to earth. They broke apart, turning back into ash. The blue streak circled back around again and again, taking more with every pass.

El, what is that?
Kreios was genuinely bewildered, and what caused him to shake his head in amazement was that he had not felt bewildered for ages.

He could feel the delight in El’s voice:
“Just watch.”

He did.

***

KREIOS WAS SAFE. HE could fly again; he was awake and aware, I could tell that much with my new super eyes. That left me free to use the Sword on the Nri.

And use it I did.
Squalembrato;
I sliced diagonally across the torso of a hideous and stinking wretch, then brought the blade back around and up, ready for the next one.
Fendente;
from twelve o’clock at the crown of its horned head with the
temperato
of my blade straight down the nasty thing, splitting its miserable carcass in two clean halves. I roared in vengeful fury, letting my love for my grandfather power my every move in midair.

Light from the Sword interlaced in three streams on the flat of the blade, winding down onto the hilt and onto my hand, up my arm. I was conjoined to the weapon; for the first time I felt that it belonged to me, that I possessed it, that it was mine to wield, mine to use. Together with it, I was aglow in the ash storm of demonic debris it created by my hand. None could withstand what I had now become.

Already supersonic, I began to pick up speed.

***

THE STREAK OF BLUE light wound its way around the cloud of the Nri, hemming them in on all sides; they had nowhere to go. Gradually as the streak went around and around, it began to take on the shape of a glowing blue globe, the trail of blue light passed through them so quickly. Huge amounts of demon detritus were grist in this mill. They fell out from the bottom of the globe as wings, trunks, limbs; now prey only to gravity and the surface of the earth miles below.

Kreios was overcome with emotion, coughing out an incredulous guffaw. El had utterly routed them. And quickly. “What is this new thing?” he asked.

Then he heard,
“Just watch.”

Kreios waited and watched still more, and then the blue light slowed as the last of the Nri clan fell away beneath. The streak became still, a point of light, a round blue aura beneath pointing downward, the unmistakable pure and bright light of the Sword of Light above.

Kreios was stunned for the second time that day. The Sword.

“Go,”
he heard.

So he went to it.

The sun was beginning its ascent in the east now. It threw its first rays upon the clouds where the battle had taken place, lighting them on fire in brilliant silver, red, and deepest midnight blue. Set like a jewel in a crown of magnificence was the radiant blue light, now just visible as a figure. It held aloft the piercing and pure Sword of Light, symbolic of victory.

He could not have imagined for anything in the world what he would behold when he drew near. There, with face burnished to glowing in the warmth of the Sword, was Airel. She smiled proudly at him.

He could do nothing but go to her and weep for his beloved granddaughter, his darling girl. She was dead, but was now alive. He shouted to the heavens with exultant joy, “She is alive. She is alive.” He fell on her shoulder and wept more, wept like a small child. The sun cast them in relief, a shimmering and pure sight.

CHAPTER XI

AS THE SUN ROSE over Cape Town, there was a problem with the Table Mountain cable cars. The system was down, the cables jammed, and a car was stuck up near the top wheelhouse, dangling motionless from the cable 3500 feet above sea level.

Workmen doing the checks that morning in preparation for the open at 8 a.m. had gone missing. Clocking in, one of them was snatched screaming across the industrial floor of the mechanical room into the predawn darkness by something powerful and hideous. His cries were stifled shortly. The next one, alerted by the disturbance, had run into the room and been blindsided, grasped about the midsection by a massive clawed hand. Before he could draw breath to cry out, he was thrown out into the ether off the sheer edge of Table Mountain, falling to his appalling death after a very long drop into nothingness.

Something dark and huge then mounted the cables, draping itself over the stopped cable car like a shroud.

As the sun began to rise, a fearsome cry rang out over the city. It sounded bird-like, but it was loud and it radiated darkness; it broadcast fear and rage. To the few early morning observers on the ground below, who could not see much, it looked like there was a massive tree tangled in the mechanism and dangling down from atop the lone stuck cable car. It fluttered and waved in the breeze.

But it was not a tree, and it was not passively fluttering.

It was the enraged prince of the Nri, the last of his kind, wearing his finest and largest suit—the one with the big wings and claws—
“the better to kill you with, my dears”
—and he was issuing the call for vengeance.

***

WE HEARD THE CAWING, croaking birdcall of the master of the principality from twenty thousand feet up. Though I had to shake my head at the relentlessness of events, I had learned to set aside my sometimes admittedly bad attitude and just buckle down. Besides, I had my grandfather back, and it was beyond awesome to be alive.

He was more than a little surprised to see me, especially up in the rarefied air he normally tread without me. He had so many questions that I was overwhelmed at first. I tried to begin to explain, but then this creature—Nwaba, Kreios called the prince of the Nri—had bellowed at us and we had to put the conversation off for the time being.

I couldn’t help but grin at Kreios as we flew together for the first time.

“I knew you were special, Airel, but this … I cannot believe it.” That just made me grin at him even more.

But the grin was wiped off my face when I saw what Nwaba had done.

There, on a cable car strung out above the city far below, was the biggest demon I had ever seen. He dwarfed the cable car on which he was perched, shrieking at us. In the carriage that dangled below were two figures that at first I did not recognize. One of them was in charge, the other was a hostage. It was obvious from their body language.

But then my newly enhanced eyes picked out something else inside the cable car, stretched out on the floor behind them. I recognized the dress. That little sundress. And the red hair. It was Kim. She looked horrible, like a corpse, and I wondered if she was alive.
If they have killed her…
I began to think of ways to punish the villains for their crimes, but then Kreios touched my arm. I looked at him and he shook his head. He had seen too.