Walking in the Midst of Fire (38 page)

The demon peered out through the Vatican magick user’s eyes, as he twisted and writhed on the floor, trying to escape the bonds that still held him. And then Remy noticed its gleeful expression change.

“Who is that?” the Larva asked, his struggles intensifying.

Remy turned to see a small shape standing just inside the door. It was one of the children.

“Hey,” Remy said, trying not to scare the youth.

The little boy, who appeared no older than six, shuffled farther into the room, the cuffs of his overly long sweatpants practically covering up his shoes.

“That man has something bad in him,” the child said, squatting down next to Remy, his gaze never leaving the panicking Malatesta.

“Keep him away,” the Larva roared, eagerly trying to get his hands free.

“I can see it,” the child said. “I did when he first got here, too.”

“You can see the bad thing?” Remy asked.

The child nodded. “I can see the good . . . and the bad.”

The child’s eyes seemed to twinkle with an eerie incandescence as he looked at Remy. “You’re a good guy,” he said, smiling. He was missing his two front teeth.

“I like to think so,” Remy replied.

Malatesta’s hand broke free of his bonds then. His fingers were horribly distended, and adorned with razor-sharp claws. He grabbed at the boy, but Remy was faster, grasping the deformed arm of the possessed by the wrist.

“He doesn’t like you,” Remy said to the boy.

“Yeah,” the child said, rubbing a filthy finger beneath his nose. “He knows I can see him hiding inside. . . . He knows what I can do.”

Malatesta started screaming, his body writhing in the throes of agony.

“Get that fucker away from me!” the evil spirit screeched in a voice that was filled with fear.

“What can you do?” Remy asked the little boy, as he struggled to hold Malatesta down.

The little boy looked down at his hands, dirty palms up.

“I can make him so he ain’t so strong,” the child said. He looked up into Remy’s eyes. “It’s my gift, I guess,” he added with a shrug.

It was then that Remy truly saw this child—these children—for what they were, for the potential they had, if they were allowed to survive long enough to show it.

“Would you use your gift to help my friend?” Remy asked.

“No!” the evil entity inside of Malatesta wailed. “No! No! Fucking no!”

“I never done it before,” the little boy said, nervously.

Remy was curious. “Then how do you know . . .”

“We all got something special,” the boy explained. “I just know what I can do.” The child looked at Remy again. “Does that sound crazy?”

Remy shook his head. “Not at all.”

The child smiled, then turned his attention to the man who lay upon the ground, violently twisting and turning. “That’s enough outta you,” he said, and placed his hands on Malatesta’s chest.

Malatesta’s neck stretched, and sharp teeth grew from his mouth as he tried to bite the child. Remy reached out, placing his palm against the man’s fevered brow and shoving his head back.

“Go ahead,” he urged the boy. “Do your thing.”

The child leaned forward upon his hands, looking as though he was going to start to perform CPR. Malatesta’s body went suddenly rigid, as if an electrical current was coursing through it. The Larva’s screams became higher and higher pitched until his mouth remained cavernously open.

Remy heard a sudden buzzing, and a swarm of flies, their bodies fat, shiny, and green, flew out of Malatesta’s gaping mouth. The sorcerer’s body had gone suddenly still, and Remy noticed that it had returned to normal. Malatesta’s eyes were fluttering now, about to open, as if coming up from a very deep sleep.

Remy looked to the boy, who was leaning back on his haunches.

“It’s weaker now,” the child said.

“It appears that way,” Remy said, amazed at what he had just seen.

The child was staring at him again, as if waiting for something.

“You did a very good job,” Remy told him, and the child beamed from ear to ear.

Malatesta awoke. “What . . . what happened?” he stammered. He sounded weak, but did not appear to be fighting the monstrous spirit that lived inside of him.

“This little guy here just saved you,” Remy said, placing his hand upon the boy’s shoulder. “And showed me that we need to do everything we can to help these kids.”

Remy burned away Malatesta’s bonds, and helped him to sit up.

“What can we do?” the sorcerer asked.

“We have to get them away from here—hide them,” Remy said.

“And how do you suppose we do that?”

“We’ll need some help,” Remy said as he fixed Malatesta in a powerful stare.

“That’s where your employer comes in.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

R
emy emerged from the building to confront the gang of children who had been left there to guard him and the others. Malatesta and Prosper followed him, propping each other up.

The children leapt to their feet and advanced menacingly toward them, but Remy held his ground.

“I don’t want to fight you,” he said, infusing his voice with the power of Heaven. It boomed, echoing powerfully in the chasms created by the abandoned buildings around them.

“Then you should go back inside,” a teenage boy said, the air around his body shimmering as if with incredible heat.

Remy shook his head. “I’m not going to do that. If I did, I couldn’t help you.”

“You’re going to help us?” the flying girl who’d hit him with one of her fireballs asked with a smirk. “Who said we wanted your help?” She hovered a few feet off the ground, and Remy could see the beginnings of fireballs coalesce in the palms of her hands.

“You’re all in incredible danger,” Remy tried to explain. “There are forces out there, in the world, that will see what you are—what you can do—as an enormous threat.”

The children looked at one another.

“You’re talking about the angels, aren’t you?” the girl who floated in the air asked him. “The angels responsible for us being born.”

Remy nodded. “Yes.”

“And what you are.”

He nodded again.

“And what about you?” asked another voice.

Remy looked over to see the older boy, Gareth, strolling down the street toward them.

“Are you afraid of us?”

Remy knew that he couldn’t lie. He couldn’t take the chance.

“Yeah,” he replied. “At least I was.”

Gareth laughed boisterously. “You should be.”

He looked to the children, who laughed along with him.

“But I’m not anymore,” Remy added.

Another boy pushed through the crowd and slowly stepped toward Remy, the flesh of his hands transformed into two blades of solid bone.

“I’d say that’s a big mistake,” he said, slashing at the air.

Remy was ready to defend himself, but was hoping that he wouldn’t have to.

“Stop,” Gareth commanded.

The boy did as he was told, and turned toward his leader.

“Get back,” Gareth said, motioning for the young man to return to the crowd.

The boy hesitated, and Remy saw the potential for a challenge, but then he returned to the group of children, his hands morphing back to normal.

“So you say you’re not afraid of us anymore,” Gareth stated. The son of Aszrus moved closer. “Why is that?”

“Don’t get me wrong,” Remy said. “I still think you’re extremely dangerous, and in need of some serious guidance, but a little while ago I saw the good that you’re capable of.”

Remy’s eyes found the little boy who had weakened the demonic spirit that had been attempting to take over Malatesta, but did not single him out, just in case there were repercussions.

“Good?” Gareth questioned. “You saw good?”

He strode toward Remy, stopping with his face mere inches from the angel’s. Remy could feel the raw power emanating from the youth, and wondered at the extent of the teen’s might.

“Do you see any good in me?” he asked, defiantly.

“I don’t want to fight you,” Remy said softly, so that only Gareth could hear. “And I don’t want to see you hurt.”

Gareth backed down slightly, but Remy could see the frustration that burned in his eyes.

“What makes you so different from the rest?”

“Let’s just say I left their company a long time ago and leave it at that,” Remy explained. “But I still understand them well enough to know what they’ll do when they find out that something like you—
all of you
—exists.”

“We’ll fight them,” Gareth said angrily.

“And you’ll die,” Remy told him as a matter of fact.

“If that’s the way it has to be . . .” Gareth’s voice trailed off. “We’re all supposed to be dead anyway.”

“But it doesn’t have to be like that,” Remy said. “You could live.”

Gareth turned away, walking back to the gathering of children. He could see the anticipation on their faces, eagerly awaiting their leader’s orders to take him down.

Remy continued to stand his ground, hoping Gareth was smarter than that.

“Do you know how much I wanted him to like—to love—me?” Gareth asked.

Thunder rumbled in the distance, another storm on its way to the island.

Remy remained silent.

“At first, when I realized what he was—who he was—all I wanted to do was kill him,” Gareth said through gritted teeth. “But then something started to change inside of me and I realized the connection.”

He stepped toward Remy again.

“I realized that I was part of something . . .
someone
. . . . I wasn’t alone—
we
weren’t alone. And for a moment . . . a very brief moment . . . I thought that we were going to be accepted . . . that we were going to be part of a family.”

Remy could hear the pain in the young man’s voice and see the turmoil in his eyes. The poor kid just didn’t understand the kind of creatures he was dealing with.

“But I was no more important to him than a really sharp knife, or a sword. He—they—were going to use us as weapons, to fight some sort of war they suspect is coming.”

Gareth clenched his fists by his sides, and Remy suddenly felt the atmosphere around him begin to change, charged with a power the likes of which he was certain he’d never experienced before. And as if somehow picking up on the power he was broadcasting, the children behind him allowed their own new abilities to jump to life.

“They wanted weapons,” Gareth stated. “Then so be it.”

“They’ll kill each and every one of you without a second thought,” Remy stated flatly.

It looked as though Gareth was going to continue to rouse the crowd, but his speech was cut short by another voice.

“I don’t want to die,” said a small voice from within the gathering, and Remy watched as the little boy who had weakened the demon inside Malatesta pushed his way through the crowd, stopping before his leader.

“I don’t want to die,” he told Gareth again.

“You might not have a choice.”

“But he says we don’t have to.” The child pointed at Remy.

And before Gareth could reply, Remy jumped in. “That’s true. With his help,” he pointed to Malatesta. “We could take you from the island to somewhere you’d be safe and cared for.”

Remy glanced over to the sorcerer.

“The people who raised me—taught me—could do the same for you,” Malatesta said, taking his cue.

“Personally, I think it’s a whole lot better than dying,” Remy added.

Gareth looked as though he was about to reiterate his defiance, when the child spoke again.

“We did just get our gifts,” he said, holding his dirty hands up before his face. “It would be pretty sad for them to go away when we died.”

Gareth looked out over the crowd of children. It wasn’t hard to see that they were looking for some sort of guidance, and would follow whatever he decided.

The teen glanced back at Remy, and the angel could see there was still a struggle going on behind his eyes.

“What do we have to do?” he finally asked, forcing the words from his mouth.

Rome

Patriarch Adolfi lay beneath the covers in a restless slumber.

As one of the leaders of the Keepers, he was made privy to more than any man should know, the unnatural just as much a part of his day-to-day as the normal.

Of late the unnatural was all he knew, for the fate of the world was dangling precariously at the edge of the abyss.

Tonight, as he had during many recent nights, the old priest dreamed of the end of the world. He saw the planet’s greatest cities crumble, its citizenry swept up in waves of fire, and above it all God’s winged messengers waged war with nary a thought for the innocent dying in the streets below.

Above the clashing swords of fire that rained hungry sparks down upon Earth and its inhabitants, who cowered in fear, Adolfi saw the shape of Heaven in all its glory.

And then he saw it was in ruin.

The old man awoke with a gasp, clutching his pillow in the dark and realizing that he had been crying. The images of the Celestial City floating dead in the sky above a dying world filled him with such terror and sadness.

The patriarch knew that it would be impossible to sleep anymore, and pushed himself up into a sitting position—to find that he was not alone.

Adolfi gasped, throwing his frail body back against the heavy oaken headboard, a cry poised upon his lips.

“Good morning, Adolfi,” the intruder said calmly. “I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

The intruder sat in the patriarch’s favorite reading chair, beside the window that looked out onto the garden. Three others, who wore the shadows of the room like cloaks, stood to the side and behind the chair.

It was then that Adolfi realized that he knew this one, although it had been many, many years since last he’d seen him.

“Is it you?” the priest asked, his voice old and brittle.

“Yes,” the stranger replied. “It’s me.”

He stood, and silently glided across the room, stopping at the foot of Adolfi’s bed. The patriarch stared in awe at the man with the pale, almost translucent flesh, and thick black hair.

He hadn’t aged a day.

“Simeon?”

The man smiled. “I can’t tell you how good it makes me feel that you remember.”