Rusty Nails (The Dade Gibson Case Files) (3 page)

“I could have given you what your heart desired,” the child said. “But you’re the selfish kind. You would have gone on your merry way once you had what you wanted and that’s not what this is all about. There is a bigger picture, and I won’t let you ruin that.”

Locking eyes with the boy, Virgil smiled. But the smile was quickly replaced with a frown and then a grimace. Although there were no fires nearby that Benjamin could see, the stench of burning flesh was nearly strong enough to make him gag. He had just gotten his hand up to his nose when Virgil burst into flames, the unexplained fire consuming him from the inside out. Benjamin gasped as he saw Virgil’s T-shirt burn away from his skin, revealing a pair of sick, flimsy wings.

Chapter 4

After everything he had seen inside The Zodiac Club, Dade was a little on edge when he left to take Liz home, but he didn’t go straight back to his office after dropping her off. Instead, he decided to drive around for a bit, get a feel for the city. He was still new to Crowley’s Point and didn’t know his way around that well. If he was going to do much investigating in this town, he needed to know every seedy neighborhood, every slum, every coven hideout.

With each new twist and turn through the dimly lit streets, he wondered if he had made the right decision by moving here to start a new life with Liz. Until now, he only had himself to worry about. If he crossed a mob boss or smarted off to the wrong ghetto mage, the threats would be directed his way. With Liz in the picture, the bad guys would see a new target to set their sights on. It would be a whole lot easier to get to him now. All the thugs and crooks would have to do is go for her and Dade’s entire world would come crumbling down. Liz was Dade’s Achilles heel, and he knew it. The main thing was to keep everyone else from finding out about it.

The Toronado seemed to take each curve on two wheels. He knew that the balding tires were partially to blame. His lead foot was also responsible. No matter how many times Dade drove through a seedy unfamiliar part of town, he always wanted to outrun it and head back into the well-manicured lawns of the soccer-mom neighborhoods where two-point-five kids were the norm and the minivan was the vehicle of choice. Sometimes Dade almost imagined he was outrunning his own life. It didn’t always seem like such a bad idea. He just wished that he could pick and choose the parts of his old life that he could bring with him.

The Normal Rockwell pastoral in his head was quickly chased away by the ragged strains of static filtering through his radio. Dade hadn’t even realized that the radio was on. He adjusted the dial and turned down the volume, but it didn’t seem to faze the old tape deck.

Dade smacked it once with his palm, thinking that the radio had finally played its last song and given up the ghost. Then he heard his name filter over one of the stations, and his blood ran cold.

“.........Dade.........”

Dade’s hands were shaking so badly that he was forced to pull over to the side of the road. He barely noticed that he had parked under the neon triple-X of an adult bookstore.

“.....Dade....” the familiar voice whispered again underneath the static.

“I’m here,” he replied, feeling a little bit stupid for talking to a radio.

“.......watch.....out.....for.....”

The radio went suddenly silent.

Moments later, it erupted with a bout of screaming and shrieking that would have rivaled the Spanish Inquisition.

“What the hell?” Dade said. The moment the question left his lips he knew that those sorts of sounds could never come from this world. Only the afterlife held that type of suffering...and then, only for the damned.

“......angels......”

Dade’s blood ran cold at the mention of angels. It couldn’t be sheer coincidence.

“Who are you?”

“Ask…the….Egyptians…”

“What does that mean?”

This time when the radio went silent Dade knew it was for good.

His hands were trembling like those of a junkie in need of a fix, and huge beads of sweat dripped from his brow. He felt like he was submerged underwater and on the verge of asphyxiation.

Dade took deep gasps of air and rested his head on the steering wheel, desperately trying to compose himself. After he had time to collect his thoughts and his breath, Dade looked up to see if anyone had noticed his mental breakdown. Inexplicably, Dade saw the past in his rearview mirror.

Egypt....

In the blink of an eye, he witnessed water turning to blood, locusts ravaging the land, the sun turning black, and the shadow of an angel eclipsing the dunes, leaving the bodies of infant boys in its wake.

The Death Angel was wreaking havoc on the Pharoah’s Egypt.

“Angels,” Dade muttered. “What is all of this about angels?”

He nearly jumped through the roof of his Toronado when someone tapped on his windshield in reply.

“We got all the angels you want inside,” the dingy looking man said while scratching himself obscenely. “But you need to find a parking space and come inside. You can’t just sit out here in front of the main entrance and hope to get lucky.”

“Um, sorry,” Dade said as he put his car into gear and backed away. “I think I’m in the wrong place.”

“You got no idea what you’re missing,” the bookstore clerk said as he hobbled back inside. “Of course, less for you means more for me.”

Dade left the man in a cloud of dust.

The trip back to his dingy little hotel room seemed like it took years. He kept thinking that the radio was going to start blaring messages from the netherworld or that he would glance in his rearview mirror again and see the Biblical plagues laid out before him like a snippet of film. Yet, he made it back to his hotel room without incident and wasted little time finding the bottle of Jack Daniels that he kept in his desk drawer.

As he sat there thinking about the cryptic messages and drinking his liquor, he couldn’t help noting that the voice on the radio had been familiar. Although it was strained and blanketed in static, it was definitely a woman’s voice. A voice he knew. A jarring possibility nearly made him drop his bottle and run screaming into the night, but Dade somehow managed to keep his composure.

He knew that voice. No doubt about it.

But was it really his sister, Jane? After all these years, was Jane trying to warn him about something?

The voice could have belonged to someone else. Dade kept trying to tell himself that. But in the back of his mind, he knew differently.

The voice had certainly
sounded
like Jane. But was it really her? And if it was, what was she trying to tell him from the grave?

That alone was enough to make him drink, but there was one other nagging thought that made him drain the bottle. If that, indeed, was Jane then she was in a place of torment and lamentation where she would suffer for eternity.

Dade remembered her suicide and began to weep silently.

Thankfully, it wasn’t long before he passed out.

Chapter 5

The angel of death looked at himself in the mirror and marveled at how well he had preserved himself against the ravages of time. The strong cheekbones were well pronounced. The patrician nose was still straight and noble despite numerous fights. His crimson plumage was as vibrant and eye-catching as it had ever been. And his body had never been in better shape. Samael flexed his biceps, twisted at the waist to stretch the muscles in his back, squeezed his quad muscles and bent over to feel his hamstrings pull and burn. He was massive, majestic, the kind of angel that immediately demanded respect and fear. Not like those pansy cherubim.

He was a killing machine, a legendary figure in history responsible for more carnage and destruction than just about anybody, Lucifer included. But right now he also felt like a ruler. He felt like he could conquer the world. He felt strong enough to overthrow God Himself.

But one thing at a time. He was getting ahead of himself.

It was after hours at The Zodiac Club and no one was there. Samael had the place to himself and took the time to meditate on the war at hand. He spent the first few minutes reviving and manipulating a fly that one of the bartenders had killed. He began to grow bored with that, however, after one of the fly’s wings fell off. In lieu of resurrecting all of the dead insects in the bar and forcing them to fight each other, the death angel decided to ponder his situation instead.

To be honest, he had grown tired of his role as the world’s executioner. Killing was fine. It was necessary. Death was the road by which righteous souls found their way into Heaven and sinful souls were sucked into the lake of fire. But it was merely a means to an eternal end, and nothing more. Death didn’t mean much when you stopped to consider it. Samael was little more than a haberdasher, helping mankind shirk off the costumes of flesh and mortality and slip into their robes of righteousness or damnation. Skin and bones were little more than another suit of clothing to be cast aside when they grew too old and worn. Samael was the one who helped cast them aside. It wasn’t such a noble position when you stopped to think about it. And he had stopped and thought about it a lot lately.

It was what he had spent his entire life doing, and to think it was all for nothing was a little.....well, depressing. That’s what made him think about rebellion. That was the sort of thing that put you on the map. Take Lucifer, for instance. You never heard about him before The Fall. And even though he ultimately lost, his betrayal of God established him as a force to be reckoned with. No longer did you hear people saying things about Lucifer the Most Beautiful Angel in Heaven. Now, when his name was mentioned, it always came with a title like The Prince of Lies or The Deceiver. That, Samael thought, was where deserved to be, in that kind of company. And little ol’ death just didn’t cut it anymore. After all, look how many ways people were beating him these days. A heart attack wasn’t even a show stopper now. It wasn’t unheard of for somebody to have two, even three coronaries and still live. And what about cancer? No way. Forget about it. In times past, cancer was more than the kiss of the grave. It was a full-fledged make out session with death complete with tongue-kissing and fornication. Now cancer was little more than a good night peck on the cheek. Science had found ways to beat cancer, and death wasn’t as feared as it used to be.

Of course, he had changed with the times and learned to adapt. He could kill very efficiently with things like out-of-control eighteen wheelers, drive-by shootings, cocaine, serial murderers, alcohol, and AIDS. But he needed a new base of power, a new foothold. That, more than any other reason, is why he wanted to rebel. Things needed to be shaken up, and he was just the one to do it.

Humans needed to be frightened again and would be if he had any control over the way things turned out. If only he could get his hands on that rumored supply of Rusty Nails....

The addiction was the key to everything.

Samael knew all too well the allure of the crucifixion drug and wondered what his life would have turned out like had he not succumbed to the temptation. At one time (and he hated this memory even though it was true), he had felt guilty for all the death and destruction he had caused over the centuries. True enough, his actions had caused millions of souls to fly to heaven where they would spend eternity in bliss. Yet, he had also sent millions to the fire as well. And just as there was no way a righteous soul could ever be denied the pleasures of heaven, the damned could never be freed from their torments. Samael could have chosen to give any of those souls a few more hours, days, weeks before freeing them from their prisons of flesh and bone. Even a few more minutes to repent of their sins and save themselves. But more times than not, he had delighted in the fact that their time was up and laughed as he pushed them into oblivion.

Those memories haunted him until he found the blessed needle. Then, he was back to his old self again, and killing was a joy.

But sometimes, when his supply of Rusty Nails was running low, the guilt of what he had done would return. It was almost enough to drive him crazy and make him scramble for a needle.

It was enough to make him doubt himself, to doubt his purpose. How could he expect to be master of Heaven when he wasn’t even master of himself?

Samael pushed that question out of his mind as he poured himself a large decanter of wormwood liqueur. He wasn’t really that thirsty, but he did need some answers. As leader of a massive rebellion that encompassed nearly a quarter of Heaven’s angels, Samael should have been privy to a network of intelligence. But the death angel’s spies were more concerned with chasing away their own guilt than learning the secrets of the guilty. That was one of the downsides to have an entire army of addicted seraphim.

Samael paced back in forth in front of the bar while peering into the glass of green liquid. He was looking for some very specific answers and hoped that he would find them in the swirling emerald depths.

The liqueur didn’t respond immediately. Samael frowned. He started to hurl the glass against the wall and then stopped when he saw a face staring back at him from the glass.

“Who are my enemies in this war?” he asked, hoping to divine answers.

The face he saw in the drink belonged to a rugged man sitting at a desk, polishing a pistol with a damp handkerchief.

It wasn’t this fellow’s time to die. If it had been, Samael could have produced the name as easily as he could have recited the names of the last five people he had sent to their demise in a tenement fire on the other side of the world.

“He’s got a good fifty years left in him,” Samael said with some disappointment.

But Samael’s influence was far reaching and the scene zoomed in for a tighter shot of the desk. Samael squinted to read the name written on the business cards that were scattered like a deck of Tarot across the scarred blotter.

“Dade Gibson,” Samael said with a wry smile as he made out the name. “I believe I’ve met some members of your family.”

Dade, however, was oblivious to the fact that he was being watched. He was too busy admiring his own reflection in the gleam of his pistol.