Archangel Evolution

Published by David Estes at Smashwords

Copyright 2011 David Estes

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Discover other exciting titles by David Estes
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http://davidestesbooks.blogspot.com

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The Evolution Trilogy by David Estes:

Book One—Angel Evolution

Book Two—Demon Evolution

Book Three—Archangel Evolution

This book is dedicated to my readers,

past, present, and future.

You are the reason I write.

“
Everyone’s running from something

But we don’t know when it’s coming

So we keep running and running gotta

Now I’m looking up the bible tryna find a
loophole

Yeah I’m living for revival dying for a new
soul

Now there’s no light to guide me on my way
home

Now there’s no time to shine my rusty
halo

Now I’m running for the light in the tunnel
but it’s just the train

Yeah I’m looking for the right type of
pleasure but all I find is pain

Now there’s no light to guide me on my way
home

Now there’s no time to shine my rusty
halo”

The Script- “Rusty Halo”

From the album
The Script (2008)

S
hining liquid
streamed down her arm. Blood. Angel blood. But not hers.

Someone’s.

She cradled his head in her arms. She was
glowing. He was bleeding. Gabriel was bleeding. It seemed as if his
entire body was covered in the gleaming milk. She needed to find
the wound…to heal him. Fast. He was dying—that much she knew.

He was wearing a white tunic.
Strange
,
she thought. It could be replaced. She tore it off him, revealing
the horror beneath.

There was a softball-sized hole in his chest.
From the hole streamed the glowing blood. In the hole was his
beating heart. Thud, thud. Thud, thud. Thud……..thud. The beating
was slowing—he was dying. His heart—not red or pink, but white—had
been attacked: two round puncture wounds marred its fleshy surface.
The marks were familiar somehow.

She thrust her hand in the open wound,
clutched the heart, and whispered words long forgotten. Her hand
glowed as energy was transferred to him. She felt the heart squeeze
out a final beat, heard the sucking of air as his lungs took a
final gasping breath, and then nothing. Nothing. She had failed
him.

What Evil?
she thought. What Evil
would do such a thing to her? Would take the love of her life?
Would take her reason for living, her water, her air? Wanting
revenge, she whirled around, seeking the Evil. It found her
first.

The enormous ink-black snake latched onto her
chest with vice-like jaws, twisting, squeezing, tearing, ripping.
Intent on one thing: piercing her heart. Like it had Gabriel’s.

At first she struggled, attempting to pry it
from her skin, but eventually she realized the futility of her
efforts and succumbed to its desires. After all, she had nothing
left to live for. Because he was dead, too.

The snake torqued its head back violently and
she felt her chest open. She collapsed to the cold, hard ground.
Rearing above her, the serpent reveled in its victory. It held
something in its mouth; the thing was dripping bright, white
liquid. It was her heart—also white, like Gabriel’s; an angel’s
heart. The snake’s face transformed from a scaly serpent to
something humanlike. A face she had hoped never to see again. A
face she both hated and feared equally.

Dionysus laughed, and in doing so dropped her
heart, allowing gravity to carry it towards her face.

Taylor screamed. She stopped when a hand was
thrust in front of her eyes, catching the heart in mid-fall.
Lolling her head to the side, she gasped when she saw the piercing
eyes that met hers. He was alive.

D
ionysus’s eyes
sparked open as he was released from the trance. He had entered the
girl’s dream only to monger fear. For fun, really. While it was
within his power to infiltrate the dreams of angels, demons, and
humans alike, he was unable to cause any real damage by this
method. The damage would have to be done in person. He was glad
about that.

He longed to close his hands around her
filthy neck, to ring the life out of her. His hands almost itched
at the thought. While revenge would surely be sweet, it was not his
main goal. If only he could be so foolish, so impulsive. In another
time, maybe he would have charged off in a fit of rage, seeking to
satiate his growing bloodlust. But not now. Now he was a man of
self-control, mature and calculated in his meticulous planning and
scheming. The leader of his people. Loved and respected.

For a week he had meditated on what had
happened, taking his meals while sitting cross-legged on the floor.
At times he dozed, and his dreams were filled with flashbacks of
the girl ruining everything: her unexpected and seemingly
fortuitous appearance on the Warrior’s Plateau, her willingness to
bargain for Gabriel and his family, and her miraculous
transformation into an angel.

Well, more than an angel, really.

When he wasn’t sleeping, he was thinking. For
the last decade he had focused on carrying out The Plan. Despite
its genius, The Plan was a simple concept: destroy the demons,
enslave the humans, and harvest their bodies.

Ten years ago while travelling the earth,
Dionysus had learned that he could inhabit the body of any human he
chose. This was valuable because despite the many superhuman
capabilities that angels had been endowed with, immortality was not
one of them. Unfortunately, Dionysus could not outlive his body.
His only option was to replace it.

Now he was in his early fifties, but had the
body of someone in their early thirties. He fondly remembered the
day he had added decades to his life expectancy:

He had just finished a day of futile and
frantic experimenting. The eight expended human corpses were heaped
in a pile. There was no messy cleanup—not one drop of blood had
been shed. All he had left to do was burn the bodies.

The last subject was chained to the wall,
cowering, like a child afraid of the boogeyman. Dionysus would have
almost pitied him if he hadn’t hated him so much. The
twenty-five-year-old was not bad looking, handsome even by human
standards, but he was still a human, and therefore, pathetic,
weak.

Despite his frustrations, Dionysus had
managed to meditate for a few minutes, blocking out the sobbing
whimpering of the last test rat. Concentrating hard, he remembered
each failed experiment and tried to pinpoint what had gone
wrong.

In each case, Dionysus had attempted to
harness the aura, or the inner light, of each human subject and
convert the aura into energy to power his own abilities. They were
the humans with the largest auras he could find, and yet they broke
under his influence; shattered beyond repair, their internal organs
had imploded upon themselves, causing instant death. Locking on to
their auras, his powers had increased by twenty to thirty percent,
a small gain that was a far cry from what he had hoped for.

During each failed experiment there was a
point where something…strange had happened. At the point where he
could feel his own powers beginning to magnify, he could also sense
that the human was dying. He felt a pull from within him. Not a
physical pull, but a pull that could only be described as
spiritual. It was as if his soul, if he even had one, was trying to
escape his body. He could sense this pull, feel it, and it scared
him. So he simply sucked even more of the humans’ auras from them,
killing them, and releasing the strange pull.

As he dwelled on the phenomenon, he wondered
if the pull was really dangerous. Perhaps it was just a part of the
process required to harness the human aura. Or perhaps it would
kill him. Either way, it was a risk he might have to take. All
great scientists were forced to take risks to further their
knowledge. Maybe this was his great risk. His kite in the lightning
storm, so to speak.

Dionysus had boldly delved into the final
subject, the one with the largest aura, and began harvesting the
power within him. The man had screamed—oh how he had screamed; his
shrill cry was deliciously full of fear and pain and weakness. At
the point of no return, the point where he felt the pull on his
very being—his soul?—he had allowed the process to continue, had
allowed the subject to live, albeit in great pain.

It was then that he had an out of body
experience.

He could see his body, glowing, glowing, and
then going dark like an extinguished candle. While his spirit, or
something like it, hovered in the air, his body crumpled to the
floor; what was full of life became suddenly lifeless.

He turned his attention to the subject, who
was still screaming, screaming, and whose aura was glowing from
within him. And then they were one. Him and the subject. He was the
subject. The subject was not himself—not anymore. The subject was
dead, but not. The subject’s soul had died or been replaced or been
hidden, or something else entirely. Whatever the case, the subject
was no longer present in the body, but the body remained alive,
governed by Dionysus. He controlled the limbs, the bones, the
speech. He had inhabited the body.

At first he was fearful that he had
inadvertently become human again. That by some trick of the gods,
he had devolved back into the pitiful existence of his
predecessors. His fear was short-lived, however, as he had quickly
realized that all of his powers, knowledge, and strength were still
intact, they were merely housed in a new body. A younger body. One
with more years separating it from a death caused by old age.

That’s when he knew he had discovered the
figurative fountain of youth. He could live forever. In fact, all
angels could.

Dionysus smiled at the fond memory of his
discovery. It had changed everything. He had switched bodies once
more to retest his theory, carefully selecting a stunningly
handsome Italian man for the job. The same man he now looked at
every day in the mirror. He was the Italian man, or the Italian man
was him, the semantics didn’t really matter. Of course, he no
longer looked Italian, because for some strange reason his hair had
changed from a deep black to white blond when he had taken over the
body, a trick of the transition.

Only a handful of other angels within his
innermost circle knew the key to immortality, but none had chosen
to follow the path yet. But they would. When their bodies began
failing them, they would choose life. When the time was right, when
the demons had been eradicated, he would tell the rest of the angel
population his secret, and they would choose life too, helping him
to enslave all of mankind.

Unfortunately, the last week had been a major
step backwards for The Plan. When that damn girl, Taylor,
transformed into an angel, she destroyed most of the Archangel
Council—only Johanna, Sarah, and Percy remained. She had also
eliminated his ability to use her aura to destroy the demons. When
she was a human he could harness her aura to wield a weapon so
powerful that the demons wouldn’t stand a chance. However, as an
angel, her inner light had changed—for some reason angels couldn’t
access each other’s auras—rendering her useless.

The whole mess was an unexpected development,
and had sent Dionysus into a fit of rage, the likes of which hadn’t
been seen in many years. His tantrum didn’t last long, however, and
now he had a new idea—one that was given to him by Taylor. Not
intentionally, of course, but even an inadvertent gift was
valuable.

If she could evolve, why couldn’t he? Sure,
he had evolved once before, from demon to angel, and his ancestors
had once evolved from human to demon, but Taylor had been the first
to evolve from human directly to angel. Perhaps he had been
underestimating the evolutionary forces at play. Perhaps he had
underestimated himself. Perhaps he could learn from the girl.
It
couldn’t hurt to try
, he thought. But how?