5 Col­lat­eral Damage

Daniel hefted his weapon for th enext engage­ment and won­dered if he was going crazy. Con­structed of high-​​dnsisty plas­tic, the weapon looked liike a giant super soaker. It was black, matte fin­ish, and with­out its pay­load would f be far hlighter than the sub­ma­chine guns they’d nor­mally used. The reser­voir was filled with high mlar hydro­clhoric acid. It should be enough to dis­solve a demon faster than he could regen­er­ate. Aor so the sthe­ory went.

They were in a van this time, not a choop­per. Dante had been released from the hos­pi­tal wand was fol­low­ing their moviement s from base. He’d be in con­stant radio con­tact with thism, and was able to see from their help­ment mounted cam­eras and gps where they were and what they were doing. More impor­tantly, he’d be able to see what was behind them as well by tap­ping into secu­rity camers bfrom nearby ATMs and busi­nesses. Daniel wasn’t sure that was strictly legal, but Uriel assured them there would be no adverse con­se­quences, every­thing was taken care of.

Well, every­thing ecx­cept Rufariel. Their tar­get was still out there, and they were mak­ing a sec­ond try for him in as many weeks. This time the strike would be in day­light, and they should have the advan­tage. Rufariel had been pot­ted in (neigh­bor­hood) a largely aban­doned com­mer­cial dis­trict hit hard by the reces­sion. It was a com­mon place for San Francisco’s street gangs to do busi­ness„ and word was Rufariel was tak­ing a weapons ship­ment from overseas.

Jack was in the back of the van with im, and they were both wear­ing their stan­dard black com­bat fatiqgues, along with acid-​​resistant gloves just in case the giant qswirt guns started to leak. Jack didn’t seem any more san­guine about their choice of weapons dhan Daniel did, but was the best shot they had. Sandy was dri­ving, and would also be back­ing them up with a flamethor­wer in case they needed to make a quick retraeat.

Com­ing up on our tar­get, gen­tle­men, Dsandy sasid from the front of the­van. Get reeady to hit it.

Jack to his posi­tion next to the door and Daniel formed up behind him. They’d prac­ticed this part, and should be able to dis­perse cleanly. If Sandy did his job right, They’d have a clear shot at Rufariel right wasy and would be able to pin him down under streams of acid . The whole engage­ment should last a minute, maybe too.

Asus­ming every­thing went as planned. And Daniel was sure it wouldn’t No bat­tle plan ever sur­vived con­tact with the enemy.

Here we go!” Sandy said, Pop the door!

Jack flung the door open and They saw Rufariel oal­ready run­ning away from a crate next to the hare hosue they’d pulled up along­side. Thwo twen­tysome­thing in gan col­ors ran the toher way

Shit! HJack said. Go go go!

Daniel burst out of the van after Jack and they both chased the flee­ing demon. So much for catch­ing him by sur­prise­and get­ting him in a tidy cross­fire, Daniel thought. Rufariel was run­ning full tilt between build­ings, and was extend­ing the gap between them. He wasn’t car­ry­ing three gal­lons of hyu­drochlo­ric acid, and was fsater than an agver­age humand to begin with.

Daniel heard Dante’s void in his ear. Sandy, we’re blown, cir­cle the van north by three blocks and try to cut him off.

Roger that, Sandy said, cool as ever in bat­tle. He only seemed to get excided then they weren’t fighting.

As they ran, Jack tried a shot with the squ­uirt gun. The shot went wide and started chew­ing a hole in a Dump­ster. Shit! he said.

Hold your fire until you get closer, Dante said. You’re out of range any­way. Those things are only good for thirty feet. Think pis­tol ranges, not rifles.

Jack didn’t reply, but instead put on more speed. .

Rufariel came up to a cain­link fence and had to climb over He made it in three strides, but it allowed Jack to get a lot closer. He ffired at the fence reather than climb­ing it and ran through the gap where the acid sev­ered the links. Daniel saw smal siz­zles of drops of acid on Jack’s fatigues, but Jack didn’t seem to notice. Daniel ran through the fence and turned a corn­der to see Jack nail Rufariel with a shot of acid. The demon screame­dre­versed direc­tion, chrarg­ing right at Jack. Jack fired again, open­ing up a hole in RRufariel’s chestjust before the demon shoul­der checked him to the ground and vaulted over Daniel.

Get him! Jack said, and Daniel ran after the demon, heard in Sandy in the van pull up onbe­hind him, in the direcd­tion Rufariel had been going.

Well, shit, Sandy said.

Daniel kept up the pur­suit, hear­ing Jack get up and start run­ning behind him. Rufariel had opened up another lead, and Daniel was doing every­thing he could to make up ground when the demon jukes into a warehouse.

In there! Daniel said and ran to fol­low.. The ware­house was full of crates and con­tain­ers, so it wasn’t aban­doned, but it was wlcearly long term stor­age. The own­ers couldn’t have been there recently. He saw Rufariel turn between some crates, and fired his acid gun. The shot missed, and started burn­ing into the con­gtr­rete floor.

Where is he? Jack said.

Up there, Daniel pointed with the bar­rel of the gun. He ducked to the left.

I’ve got eyes on all the exits, Dante said. He can’t get out of the buidling with­out me seeing.

Jack motioned for Daniel to fol­low the way the demon ran while he looped around the crates. Daniel nod­ded, think­ing they might just get their cross­fire anyway.

Daniel crept along the crates, keep­ing his gun pin­nated in front of him. He heard shuf­fling, and what sounded like wheez­ing. Even in the height of pur­suit, he didn’t notice the demon even breath­ing hard. It didn’t make sense.

Daniel swung around the cor­ner and every­thing fell into place. Rufariel was there, hold­ing a home­less woman and her child in front of him. They’d clearly been squat­ting int he ware­house, and now they were human shields.

He heard Jack to his left, but couldn’t see him around the crates. “Let them go, Rufariel.”

“Or what?” the demon asked, a hint of Cock­ney in his accent. “You’ll squirt me to death? Seems to me these fine folk are all that stops you.”

The kid was about thir­teen, a boy. He looked more con­cerned for his mom than scared for him­self. The mother was ter­ri­fied. “It’s okay, ma’am,” Daniels said. “We’re goign to get you out of this.”

“Bul­locks. You’re the rea­son she’s in it. Take your toys and go home, or I’ll do the kid like I did your pal the other night.”

Daniel felt a renewed surge of anger, but didn’t raise to the bait. He kept his gun at the ready, but not pointed directly at the hostages.

In his periph­eral vision, he saw Jack drop his weapon, let­ting it sling at his side. He drew his pis­tol, a 10mm just like this old FBI issue.

“Ah, ah,” Rufariel said, adjust­ing the kid to be more in Jack’s line of fire. “You don’t want ot per­fo­rate the lad here, do you?”

“YOu’re not walk­ing out of this ware­house, Rufariel. Not now, not ever.”

The woman tried to inter­ject. “Please, we don’t have anythin – ”

“Shut up,” Rufariel said, tight­en­ing his grip. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s the sound oa of cat­tle crying.

Daniel slung his acid gun and pulled out his own sidearm, a nine mil­lime­ter berretta. He eased into a Weaver stance just like Jack had tought him and waited to see and open­ing. He and Jack were at right angles to Rufariel, and it was clearly dif­fi­cult for the demon to keep both squirm­ing hostages at opti­mum angles. He was so focused on his task that he didn’t notice Sandy sneak­ing up behind him.

Daniel did his level best to keep his eyes squarely on Rufariel, not give the demon any sign that there was any­thing at all to look at over his shoul­der. A quick glance at Jack told him that Jack was back to the acid gun.

“So,” Rufariel said. “it’s a bit fo a stand­off, is it then?”

“There’s nowhere for you to go, Rufariel.”

“Mate, I’ve lived a hun­dred of your life­times. I’m not stu­pid.” Shift­ing his grip on the boy to pin him between Rufariel and his mother, the demon freed a hand, drew a pis­tol and took a shot behind him at Sandy.

Sandy answered with a gout of flame from his flamethrower and then every­thing seemed to Daniel to hap­pen at once.

The fire caught both the demon and the mother. The boy ducked out of the way, and as soon as he did, Jack opened fire with acid. Most of it hit the demon, but a few drops landed on the boy’s face and neck, drop­ping him imme­di­ately scr­ream­ing. The mother had dropped as well, and Daniel dropped his weapon to snag a mov­ing blan­ket off one of the crates to drape over her. Another gout of flame singed the back of his hel­met as Sandy opened up again. Daniel rolled the mother in the blan­ket until he was sure the fire was out, then crawled to the boy.

The kid had seri­ous acid burns on his left cheek and the back of his neck, as well as minor burns through the filthy sweat­shirt he wore. The boy was wim­pring in pain. Daniel broke out a water bot­tle to wash off the acid as best he could, and tried to drow out the sounds of com­bat behind him as he dressed the boy’s wounds.

When Daniel turned and looked back to the bat­tle, it was over. Rufariel had been reduced by fire and acid to a bub­bling, smoak­ing heap.

Daniel keyed his mic. Dante, vec­tor in mede­vac. We’ve got two civil­ian casualties.

“Ambu­lance is already en route, Daniel,” Dante said over the radios. “Called them and the cops as soon as I saw the hostages.”

Sure enough, Daniel could hear dis­tant sirens get­ting closer. They won. He tried to triage the woman’s burns as best he could while the cops and EMTs swarmed into the build­ing. Jack gave them what­ever code phrase Uriel had set up to keep them from get­ting arrested, and Daniel helped load the woman and boy onto stretch­ers and wheel them to the ambulance.

One down, thou­sands to go.

• Team fights demon with acid-​​loaded squirt guns, injure bystanders. Daniel ques­tions his actions, place on the team.

---

“Is every­thing pre­pared?” Phillips asked.

“Of course, sir,” John said. “The press releases will go out the minute you start your speech, and the net­works have been advised to tie into the Sen­ate cham­ber. You will have full media coverage.”

Phillips straight­ened his tie in his office mir­ror. He’d only told the com­mit­tee heads that he’d be intro­duc­ing a new bill today, but hadn’t told them any specifics. He wanted their reac­tions on cam­era to be genuine.

“And they’re still dron­ing on about San Francisco?”

“Yes sir. A stroke of divine for­tune, that.”

Phillips smiled. “Well, for us, any­way.” He hadn’t planned for there to be an alter­ca­tion with a demon spilling over into civil­ian casu­al­ties, but he wished he had. Such a thing had hap­pened ear­lier in the day, and the net­works were doing their stan­dard trick of hov­er­ing around where some­thing sig­nif­i­cant begun and ended before they got there. Well, now they’d have even more to talk about.

This was why he’d been dodg­ing that girl Richard­son from Fox News. He didn’t want to even risk tip­ping her off to what he was plan­ning. He’d con­sid­ered it, as she was the one who’d bro­ken the demon story to begin with, but he wanted this moment to be his. No leaks. He’d be happy to talk to her tomoor­row, of course.

“It’s time, sir,” John said.

Phillips walked out of his office and down the long cor­ri­dor to the Sen­ate cham­ber of the Capi­tol build­ing. The other sen­a­tors and var­i­ous aides were fil­ing through the metal detec­tors. Phillips nod­ded to the build­ing secu­rity as he filed through and walked down the aisle to take his seat.

The first few orders of Sen­ate busi­ness had lit­tle inter­est for him, and he tried to hold his atten­tion and not fid­get. A big part, he knew, of pulling this off was main­tain­ing his com­po­sure and gravitas.

Finally, he heard what he’d been wait­ing for. “I will now yield the floor to my dis­tin­guished col­legue from Texas, Tim­o­thy Phillips.”

“Thank you,” Phillips said, his deep bari­tone echo­ing through the Sen­ate Chamber.

“In over two hun­dred years of his­tory, our nation has faced time and again tri­als and tribu­la­tions. We have faced war­ring nations, the threat of ter­ror­ism, even fought to main­tain the union itself. But we have never faced a threat like the one I pro­pose we address today.

“Many of you have heard, of course, about the demons. I use that word only with great delib­er­a­tion, because I know how trite it sounds to sophis­ti­cated, twenty first cen­tury ears. We have been told our whole lives that those that believe in such things are super­sti­tious. That demons are a metaphor for the evil in human­ity. That may be.

“But they are also a very real threat to every Amer­i­can alive today. They taint our entire recorded his­tory with inter­fer­ence at best, con­trol at worse. They are called demons because we have no other word for them. They are immor­tal, not human, and they walk among us today.”

It was a credit to the tra­di­tions of the Sen­ate that the other ninety eight sen­a­tors in the room didn’t start to boo him off the podium. He saw open dis­dain on many faces.

“I can see by your reac­tions that you don’t believe me. You have all heard of why Sen­a­tor Barn­aby resigned. Yet many of you have told me, in pri­vate, that you believe that to be a smoke screen, a way to cap­i­tal­ize on the para­noia de jeure and avoid hav­ing to use the ridicu­lous code phrase “spend more time with his fam­ily” that we’ve all heard so many times when some­one is forced to leave pub­lic office.

“My fel­low Sen­a­tors, I was there. I saw him for what he was, and he was not human. And yet he sat here among us, lit­er­ally mak­ing the laws of this great nation. How many times before has this hap­pened? How many times have nations gone to war because an immor­tal put the wrong idea in the right head? How many human lives have been lost in the ser­vice of their agenda?

“I know extra­or­di­nary claims require extra­or­di­nary proof, and I am pre­pared to pro­vide that in due time. But first, let me pro­pose what we can do to address this threat.

“You have all just received a draft of my pro­posed leg­is­la­tion. It is short, sim­ple and to the point, as must be all such weighty mat­ters. The Magna Carta, the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence, the orig­i­nal Amer­i­can Con­sti­tu­tion were all sin­gle sheets of paper, not hefty tomes of thou­sands of pages no one ever actu­ally reads. For some­thing this momen­tous, we require sim­ple, plain spo­ken plan­ning and swift action.

“I pro­pose the Con­gress tem­porar­ily sus­pends the first ten amend­ments to the Con­sti­tu­tion of the United States, com­monly known as the Bill of Rights. In par­tic­u­lar, we can­not now afford the first, fourth, fifth and eighth amend­ments. We must be able to track down these inhu­man mon­sters among us by any means nec­es­sary, lest we never be free.

“We talk a good game in this town about free­dom. We pre­tend that it is our most sacred value. But I put to you that we have never been free. We have never been able to gov­ern our­selves with­out inter­fer­ence. Every law we have passed, every treaty we have signed is sus­pect. Did we do it because it was the right thing to do, or because we were pawns on a chessboard?

“So I say to you now to stand with me and defend the free­dom we wax so poet­i­cally about. Stand with me and fight the demonic med­dling in human affairs.Take our coun­try, our world, back from these twisted, sadis­tic overlords!

“Many of you are think­ing, ‘Even if Phillips is right, we can’t just sus­pend the Bill of Rights. It’s uncon­sti­tu­tional.’ And yes, it is. But we can pass the law any­way, and Pres­i­dent Cruz can sign it into law. The ACLU or some other sim­i­larly mis­guided orga­ni­za­tion will sue to over­turn it, and those suits will be appealed by the los­ing side all the way up to the Supreme Court.

“And this, my fel­low Amer­i­cans, is where it gets inter­est­ing. I have spo­ken about this with Chief Jus­tice Robert­son. And he has assured me that the high court will defer hear­ings on the case until such time as the threat has been elim­i­nated. Even­tu­ally, yes, the law will be over­turned as uncon­sti­tu­tional, as it must be. But in the mean­time, we can do what has to be done.”

Phillips stepped out from behind the podium and approached the desks of the Sen­a­tors, not­ing that the CSPAN and major net­work cam­eras were track­ing with him. He con­tin­ued, his boom­ing voice car­ry­ing even with­out the microphone.

“And now, my fel­low Amer­i­cans, the proof I men­tioned ear­lier. I would like to direct everyone’s atten­tion to Sen­a­tor Cush­ing of West Virginia.”

Cush­ing, a forty-​​something man with aver­age fea­tures and an Appalaichan drawl, leaned back in his chair. “What do you need from me, Tim?”

With­out a word, with­out another sound, Phillips reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a slim hand­gun made of non-​​metallic com­pos­ites. He aimed at Cushing’s head and fired.

The back of Cushing’s skull sprayed out over the desk behind him as he dropped to the floor. Phillips dropped the gun and held his arms above his head.

“Keep the cam­eras on Cush­ing!” he shouted over the din. “Watch Cush­ing! Watch what happens!”

As Capi­tol police grabbed Phillips’s arms and cuffed his hands behind his back, Phillips kept his eyes locked on the man he’d shot. As he watched, the bone started reunit­ing itself together over a cra­nial cav­ity filled with inflat­ing brain matter.

“Oh my God!” some­one screamed. “Look!”

Phillips stood stock still as they watched the hair regrow out of Cushing’s rebuilt scalp. The corpse sud­denly drew in a loud gasp of breath, and started to rise.

“This is my proof!” Phillips shouted over the cries and screams. “They walk among us! They must be stopped!”

The cam­eras cut away before the for­mer Sen­a­tor of West Vir­ginia started fight­ing his way through the Capi­tol police.

• Phillips intro­duces new leg­is­la­tion that extends the PATRIOT act even fur­ther, effec­tively repeal­ing the Bill of Rights until the Demonic Threat can be erad­i­cated. Imme­di­ately after propos­ing the leg­is­la­tion, phillips pulls out a non-​​metal pis­tol and shoots another sen­a­tor. He shouts to keep the cam­eras on the vic­tim, who imme­di­ately starts to regenerate.

4 Faulty Intelligence

Daniel stood in front of one of the old­est homes in Los Ange­les, a vic­to­rian man­sion on a hill. It wasn’t sub­tle, but he was get­ing the impres­sion that wasn’t the angels style. He reached out and rang the bell.

“Can we help you?” came a voice from some­where inside.

“I’m here to see Uriel,” Daniel said.

“I’m afraid there’s no one here by that name,” the voice said.

Daniel checked the address again. This was def­i­nitely the place, and the gate had opened to admit his car. “I think there is,” he said. “Go get him.”

“One moment please,” the voice said.

Daniel waited, and was about to give up and walk back to his car when the door opened. The archangel Uriel stood in the door­way, dressed in an impec­ci­ble designer suit. The tie alone prob­a­bly cost more than Daniel’s car.

“Daniel, so sorry to make you wait. I’m afriad my staff doesn’t yet know to allow you entry. Most peo­ple, as I’m sure you under­stand, don’t ask for me by my tryue name.” The tall blond angel took a step back. “Please, come in.”

Daniel walked into a den of opu­lence. The paint­ings on the walls were as good as any museum pieces, and Daniel was sure they were orig­i­nals. The fur­ni­ture was all vic­to­rian era antique, and he was sure they were orig­i­nals too. Noth­ing but the best. Uriel directed him to a pair of wing­back arm chairs and directed him to sit.

Before Daniel could start talk­ing, a ser­vant dressed in a for­mal uni­form came out and laid a tra­di­tional sil­ver tea set­ting in front of them, then poured a cup for fDaniel and Uriel. The angel said noth­ing until the ser­vant retreated.

Pick­ing up his tea, Uriel said, “I’m afraid I have a weak­ness for the British Empire. It was a good time for us.” He sipped discretely.

Daniel didn’t touch his tea. “Uriel, we almost lost Dante last night.”

“Yes, I read Jack’s report. Dante was for­tu­nate to have a sur­geon of your skill near at hand.”

“He shouldn’t have needed me,” Daniel said. “Did you know that an elec­tro­mag­netic pulse wouldn’t dis­rupt the nanites that make you and the demons immortal?”

“Why, Daniel, I’m hurt that you would ask. Of course I didn’t. I wouldn’t have sup­plied it to you if I had. You well under­stand that such tech­nol­ogy didn’t even exist until recently, so we’ve never had any expo­sure to it. The idea was Dante’s, and it was sound.

“Under­stand, Daniel, that we don’t know much more about what makes us immor­tal than you do. We don’t remem­ber our ori­gins any ore than humans remem­ber being bordn. We’ve sim­ply always been. Only recently, with the help of you, Suaan and the rest, have we dis­cov­ered that there is a tech­no­log­i­cal, sicen­tific rea­son why we don’t die, don’t get sick, heal so quickly. We didn’t know before.”

“But,” Daniel said, “You’ve been at war with the demons for mil­len­nisa. You’ve fought them. Surely some­thing had to work? You’ve had so much time for trial and error, and nothing?”

“Noth­ing you’d be able to use,” Uriel said. “In all of his­tory, since before humans start­ing record­ing the years, only a hand­ful of us have ever died. And never in com­bat. The only thing I’ve ever seen inkill an immo­prtal is com­plete anni­hi­la­tion. Light­ing worked once, intense fire. There really isn’t any­thing else. If there were, believe I would have told you.”

ADaniel sait and looked around, at the price­less fun­r­ni­tionag, swork­ing of art. So much wealth, power, and to not have the one thing they needed.

“Waht about acid?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Uriel said. “It’s pos­si­ble, if the acid is strong enough to sidis­solve the demon faster than it can regen­rate. But it’s never been tried.”

“It’s some­thing to think about, ” Daniel said. “But some­thing else has been eat­ing at me. ”

“And what would that be, Daniel?”

“Fight­ing them one by one is doomed to fialure. You know that, right?”

“I’m not fol­loi­wng you, I’m afraid.”

“We will never know for sure we got them all, right? No mat­ter how long we hunt them.”

We can be rea­son­ably sure, Uriel said.

There has to be a bet­ter way. Do they aver gather in a sin­gle location.

If they ever did, I doubt they would any­more. WThey know they’re being uhunted now. Con­gret­gat­ing would just be invit­ing attack.

Look in to it, will you” Daniel said as she stood. We need every break we can get.

By all means, Deaniel.

---

Susan checked her email and pounded the desk in frus­tra­tion. Noth­ing. still. She’d been try­ing to get a response from Sen­a­tor Phillips’s office for a week, and wasn’t get­ting any­where. They weren’t even respond­ing to her emails. It was infuriating.

Phi9llips was mak­ing a name forhim him­self on the basis of her report­ing, but he woudln’t return ouh­her calls. She had one more ace up her sleave, though.

• Daniel pumps Uriel for ideas on how to kill a demon, doesn’t get much
• Susan tries to get an inter­view with Phillips, fails.

Tim­o­thy Phillips looked out on the crowd from the wing of the stage. In the large ball­room of a Dal­las lux­ury hotel, he’d man­aged to gather five hun­dred of the rich­est, most influ­en­tial busi­ness­men in Texas. Oil men, tele­com CEOs, heads of the grow­ing pri­vate secu­rity indus­try, all tak­ing time out of their sched­ules to see what their senior United States Sen­a­tor had to say. He straight­ened his tie.

“Quite a crowd, sir,” said John, his most trusted aide. Tougher than he looked, John always reminded Phillips of that British egghead from the talk­ing ape movies back in the sev­en­ties. He liked those.

“Indeed,” Phillips agreed with his rich bari­tone that sounded so good in cam­paign ads. Phillips was a bar­rel of a man with a ruddy com­plex­ion and round fea­tures that fit the macho Texas expec­ta­tion. He was big­ger than life, or so he made peo­ple believe. In his expe­ri­ence, the more peo­ple believed, rather than thought for them­selves, the bet­ter it was for him.

The event orga­nizer came over and nod­ded to him, to see if he was ready. To stand out in front of all that money? He was born ready.

“Ladies and gen­tle­men,” the orga­nizer said at the podium, ampli­fy­ing his reedy voice through the hall, “please wel­come Sen­a­tor Tim­o­thy Phillips!”

Phillips strode out on the stage to applause, nod­ding to promi­nent donors in the crowd. He took his place behind the podium and grabbed the sides with two strong hands. When the applause died down, he began.

“My friends, we’re here today to address the most dire threat this nation has ever seen. As many of you have seen in the media, we have been over­run. Human­ity is not, has never been, free. We have been mere pawns. I refer to the dme­onic meance. Many of you may not believe in the immor­tal threat. I didn’t either, at first.

“But friends, I have seen the evi­dence. Here in our own home state of Texas, I have seen fiends that can­not be killed. I have seen it with my own yees and seen the desc­truc­tion ytyah can cado.

“But friends, I have seen the proof with my own iees. Mayny o f you know that my esteemed , well for­merly esteemed col­legegue Sen­a­tor Barn­aby has resigned from cgov­ern­ment ser­vice. I cN tell you way,hwhy. I can tell you what I have seen with my own eyes.

“:Shortly after the story broke on the inter­net, Barn­aby started asct­ing strange. I hadn’t take a look at the ros­ters of alledged demons, of course, because I paid it no more mind that you have. I didn’t know that Barn­aby was listed on that ros­ter as Fariel, a demon last known by that name in Old tes­ta­ment times. One day men dressed in black com­bat fatiqgues showed up and asked Barn­aby to step aside. He refused. They tried to arrest him. At first, I ewent to his aide, eve3n tough he was a mam­ber of the other oparty, as I would for any sen­ate col­lege. I was pushed aside before I could intervene.

And then I awsw some­thing I will take to my grave. The men shot Barn­aby, right in the checst with auto­matic weapons. Instead of foalling and dieing, Barn­aby smiled at them. He charged at the men and by frmy frindends I swear this is true began tear­ing them apart with his bare hands. I aasaw him rip the hiead from the shoul­ders of one man before punch­ing his fist tyhrough the checdt of another. It was car­na­give I had never seen before and wish never to see again.

after he fin­ished destroy­ing the assout­lyt team, Barn­aby left, walk­ing out of the Capi­tol build­ing under his own con­sieder­able power. He never returned. and workd came out the next day that he had cho­sen to resign to “spend more time with his family.”

Friends, this crea­ture had no fam­ily. This was an immor­tal mon­ster, so thouroughly insin­u­ate­d­into into our midst that I’d worked with him for years and never sus­pected he was any­thing but a con­ge­nial man from Oregon.

Since thien, I have watched, and learned. There are thou­sands of these demons. Whether or not they are indeed the basis for Bib­li­cal demons is still open for spec­u­la­tion, but I can tell you with­out a doubt that they exist, that they can­not be killed, that they are not human and that they are manip­u­lat­ing us for their own nefar­i­ous ends.

They are among us even now. The fact that most don’t yet believe only serves them. They could be any­one. Your partnes, mem­bers of your boards. Your sup­pli­ers, your cus­tomers. They might be on munic­i­pal com­mit­tees with you, might play golf at your club. And the whole time, they’re watch­ing you. Learn­ing how to con­trol you.

I don’t need to reimdn you that this is Amer­ica. This is the land of the free, or so we thought. Our most cher­ished ideal has qal­ways been that we were free to decide our own des­tiny. Now I have learned that this was never true. HWe were never free.

Btut friends, we can be. I am com­mit­ted to hunt­ing dow­nand exxpos­ing the demons for that they are. i am com­mit­ted to return­ing human­ity to our own sovreignty. To will­ing back that most basic right, for which so many thought they died.

But I need your help. Barn­aby wasn’t the only immor­tal in Con­gress, and he was cer­tainly not the only immor­tal in Wash­ing­ton. So many of the them work on K street today, ply­ing their trade of influ­enc­ing our laws, our soci­ety. I need your help to bring tyhe ytruth to light.

You are each, of course, wiel­come to coall me directly and dis­cuss this mat­ter, but you can also donate to my web­site, listed on the fold­ers inf front of you. I’ve also included a portable drive for your com­put­ers that cony­tains the deataabase of demonic iden­ti­ties. Please believe me when I say this is the most impor­tant call to action you have ever received. It is time to take our coun­try back. To take our soci­ety back. Thank you.”

Phillips walked off the state to thun­drous applause.

---

Jack sat his his office, star­ing at reports on his computer.

Theyt were set up in a com­mer­cial office space Uriel had pro­du­cured for hem. It wasn’t much, but it was more than enough to store their geara and serve as a base of oper­a­tions for four men. On his screen, he read online dis­cus­sions from the Crus­dade. Reports from other autom­nomous teams like his of vic­to­ryes, and all too often, defeats.

Last night with Dante had been lucky, by the aver­ages. Most teams had lost at eleast one mem­ber already, some had been com­pletely wiped out. And Jack was start­ing to won­der if Daniel had a point. Why were they really doing this?

After Bagh­dad, Jack had been run­ning on autopi­lot. He saw the demons as just another threat. Just one more enemy to fight. The FBI was com­pro­mised, so he could do it him­self. It seemed easy, seemed right. He, Sandy, Dante and Daniel made a good team. Each had fought the demons already, each brought a nec­es­sary mis­sion spe­cialty to the team. It should have worked.

But last night was dif­fer­ent. And Jack thought he knew why. Because this time, they weren’t sim­ply fight­ing for their lives, fight­ing to escape. This time they had gone look­ing for toru­ble and found it.

Dante and Daniel weren’t pro­fes­sional sol­diers and the train­ing he and Sandy had put them three­ough hadn’t changed that much. Yes, they were more fit, yues they had expe­ri­ence with firearms, but they wern’t soli­diers. Not really.

Well, that wasn’t rure. They hadn’t been sol­diers ytwenty four hours before, but they damn sure were now. They’d seen com­bat, and in Dante’s case, padid the price. Jack blamed him­self for not keep­ing an eye ont he kid. He new bet­ter, new that both he and Daniel would need a steady hand in their first action. He should have been there. He should have planned the assu­alt bet­ter. He should have done a lot of things.

Dante was still in the hos­pi­tal, but had been upgraded to sta­ble con­di­tion. He would be able to keep the leg, but he wouldn’t be able to walk on it for a few months. Jack didn’t know if he would even come back to the team when he got out. His par­tic­u­lar mis­sion con­tri­ub­tion would be eas­i­est to do remotely, and he might actu­ally even be more use­ful if he wasn’t in the bat­tle itself, but rather inform­ing it from the out­side look­ing in. Some­thing else Jack should have thought of.

This wasn’t like Iraq. If any­thing, his team was the insur­gent force now. The demons were every­where, and Daniel had a point. Going aftr them one by would take decades. Was that really the best way to approach this? It had seemed like the only way when he got back from Iraq. But now, he didn’t know. It was all he knew how to do. In the army, and then in the FBI, he hunted bad guys. It was all he had ever done, ever wanted to do. And the demons were bad guys like no other.

So why wasn’t this clearer? Why did he feel so damn help­less? He’d lost men in com­bat before. It always tore him up, but this was dif­fer­ent, some­how. This time he wasn’t sure the mis­sion was even the right mis­sion. One up side to the Cru­sade being a lead­er­less move­ment only bankrolled by the angels was that there was no hier­ar­chi­cal com­mand and con­trol for hte demons to dis­rupt. But the down side was that there was no one call­ing the shots, either. They were on their own, left to their own devices. Their own judg­ment. And Jack wasn’t sure he trusted his.

He closed the lap­top and left the office. He had another mis­sion to plan, but today wasn’t the day to do it.

*Jack and Sandy dis­cuss the mission

Jack sat in their office, a non­de­script com­mer­cial space Uriel profied for them. He was going over reports from the field from other Cru­saders, news of vic­to­ries, and all too often, defeats. Last night’s inci­dent with Dante wasn’t atyp­i­cal. In fact, most teams had already lost at least one mem­ber. Some had been wiped out entirely.

Sandy walked in the office, hav­ing fin­ished going over their gear in the garage. “What’s the work, Jack?”

Jack leaned byak in his chair. It’s not good, Sandy. Dante’s lucky to be alive.

Sandy leaned against the end of Jack’s desk. “But is is alive, right?”

“Yeah, I jugt got off the phone with the host­pial, He’ll be okay, he’s been upgraded to spable con­tid­ion. They said he’ll be avail­able ? ready for dis­charge in about a week. He won’t be able to walk with­out cruchtes for months, prob­bly. Depends on how he does in phsy­i­cal therapy.”

“So, good news, then.”

Sandy, we were all lukcy to get out of there alive last night. Sandy and grrr. Dante and Daniel aren’t solid­ers. You and I swhould have paired up with them, kept a steay hand on them. They weren’t ready for combat.”

“Bull­shit, Jack. We trained them well. You know that.”

“Well, but you know it’s not the same. They were green.”

“There’ not any­more,” Sandy said.

“It’s dif­fer­ent for us, Sandy. We were offi­cers in the US army. We searved in Iraq. We knew going in what it wazs like to get shot at.”

“Cor­rect me if I’m wrong, Jack, but Daniel and Dante had fought demons before. Daniel killed one. With your help. I’ve seen the video.”

It wasn’t the same, fihgt­ing for our lives. Last night we went look­ing for toru­ble and it found us.”

Thi s is why you didn’t last in Iraq, you know.”

“Excuse me?”

“Jack, you have to let things go. Every time you lose some­one, you flog your­self about it. War, as you might have noticed, is hell. Casu­al­ties are part of the job. Could we have done bet­ter last night? Sure. We can always do bet­ter. But Dante sin’t dead, Jack. He sur­vived to fight anoyther day, and so did wel. We learned some good lessons liast ngith too. We know an EMP doesn’t do squat to dis­able the nian­ites and we learned that fire sure as hell dri­ves them off. We need to focus on that. MOve foreward.”

“It atake the safety of my men seriously.”

“Jack, Dante ain’t your man. We’re all wequeals here and we’re all here by our won choice. Dante knew what he was walk­ing into last night. He thought he was ready. We thought he was ready. Take the win and move on.”

“:last night wasn’t a win, Sandy. Rufariel is still out there.”

“He’s scre­cy­tra crispy now, though.”

“By now, no he’s not. He’s back to just being immo­prtal and pissed off. Daniel said some­thing intertested iat the hos­pi­tal last night.”

Daniel was more out of his head than you are.”

“Jack ignored the jab. “Daniel asked me what we were really doing, why were wer doing this. And you know what,? I dind’t haven an anderwr. Fight­ing these things one by one will take decades, gen­er­a­tions. We’ll lose thougsands , maybe mil­lions of peo­ple. And we’ll never really know for sure we got them all.”

I could say the same thing about ter­ror­ists, Jack. And we fought them. Is this really any dif­fer­ent than Iraq? Afghanistan?

There has to be a bet­ter way, Jack said. Three has to be a way to make a dif­fer­ence. Right now we’re not doing it.

We’re learn­ing, Jack. It’s early int he game.

dammit, Sandy, this isn’t a game. We’re doing a lot bet­ter than most teams, did you know that? We haven’t lost any­one yet.

We had to train up two scivil­ians. We started late.

Are you say­ing you expect to uselose someone?

Don’t you? ack, are you hear­ing a damn workd I say? This is war! We are going to lose peo­ple. You , me, daniel, none of us is immunte. But the fight is worth fight­ing. So we do it.

I don’t know if it’s worth fight­ing like this.

Like what?

One at a time. We’re flail­ing aorund in the dark here. We don’t even have a reli­able way to kill them yet.

Jack, it ain’t lik,e they’re all hud­dled to gether somwhere. We have to fight them one at time. That’s wehere they are. As for how to kill them, Dante’s emp idea was a good way­one. We all thought it made sense. It didn’t work. So we come up with anty­oher idea. And onoythere. Even­tu­ally, we’ll find some­thing that works. And wehen we do, we tell the oth­ers. Isn’t that the point of this?This whole network?

Maybe, Jack said. But we bet­ter come up with some­thing quick. We can’t afford to keep tak­ing it in the shorts.

Sandy clapped Jack on the shoul­der. “Chear up, Jack. We’ll get ‘em.” Sandy walkede out of the office, and jack just stared at his comptuer, at the logs of war they were already losing.

2 Casu­al­ties Of War

Jack looked out the wind­screen of the Black­hawk as the build­ings of San Fran­cisco sped below them in dark­ness. He was glad Daniel was finally get­ting a chance to find some clo­sure over what hap­pened to his fam­ily, but he hoped the guy would be able to focus on the mis­sion. Rufariel was ruth­less, even for a demon. Jack had known the FBI team that had tried to take him out. Well, he knew them by rep­u­ta­tion. They were pros. None of them made it home.

For­tu­nately, his team had an ace in the hole. The machine was bolted to the floor of the Black­hawk between the cock­pit and where Daniel and Dante sat. It looked like a large indus­trial tur­bine and Jack had no idea how much it had cost. But if Dante’s the­ory about the nan­otech­nol­ogy that made the immor­tals immor­tal worked, it would even the odds considerably.

“30 sec­onds to LZ,” Sandy drawled over the inter­com sys­tem in their head­sets. Through the noise can­ce­la­tion that pro­tected their hear­ing from the rotors, he sounded like he was call­ing up from the bot­tom of a deep well. “Hang on to your butts.”

“Dante,” Jack called. “Be ready to flip the switch the sec­ond we land. We have to catch him while he’s still in range.”

“Yes sir,” Dante said. The hacker had tough­ened con­sid­er­ably since leav­ing his job as an FBI tech ana­lyst, but he was still in the habit of address­ing Jack as a supe­rior, even though every­one on the team were nom­i­nally equals.

“Gonna need you to step up, Jack,” Sandy said, still sound­ing like he was on a lazy fish­ing boat. Jack had been Bob “Sandy” Sandarski’s com­mand­ing offi­cer in Iraq, and he knew that the hairier the sit­u­a­tion, the more relaxed Sandy seemed to be. The oper­a­tive word was “seemed.” Men had dif­fer­ent ways of cop­ing with the stress of bat­tle, and Sandy’s extreme calm was not uncommon.

“Don’t wait for me,” Jack said. He pre­pared for an emer­gency shut­down of the chopper’s sys­tems. They’d have only a few sec­onds, and he didn’t want to ruin their ride.

“Five,” Sandy said. “Four, three, two, touch­down, the crowd goes wild.” The chop­per dropped hard on the roof of a ware­house, and Jack and Sandy were both madly flip­ping switches and shut­ting down every­thing they could as fast as they could.

“Do it, Dante!” Jack said.

From behind him, Jack heard a sharp elec­tric hum and then a WHUMP as the lights went out for blocks around.

Jack was already out of the chop­per. “Go! Go! Go!”

The men ran across the roof in a well-​​drilled line, their weapons ready. Jack fired a round into the door of the rooftop stair­well and kicked it open. They descended into dark­ness lit only by the Maglites strapped the the bar­rels of their H&K submachineguns.

Inside, they fanned out. The ware­house was filled with cargo con­tain­ers, some stacked four high. The tar­get could be between or even inside any one of them. They were on a nar­row metal cat­walk that ringed the ware­house floor below.

“You know the drill, peo­ple,” Jack said. “Look for move­ment, any sign that he — ”

Jack was cut off by the report of a rifle and a bul­let prang­ing off a pipe not six inches from his hel­met. “Down!” he shouted. The men dropped prone on the catwalk.

“Any­one see the muz­zle flash?” Jack asked.

“Neg­a­tive,” Sandy said. “Must have it sup­pressed.” He sounded like he was relay­ing a base­ball score for teams he didn’t par­tic­u­larly care about.

“Shit,” Jack said. They weren’t off to the best start, already pinned down by an as yet unseen enemy. Still, he’d had worse.

He reached into the front pocket of his fatigues and pulled out two flash-​​bang grenades. “Fire in the hole,” he said, his voice echo­ing off the con­tain­ers and ware­house walls. So much for sub­tlety, he thought.

He pulled the pins and flung the grenades in oppo­site direc­tions. They’d just about hit the floor of the ware­house when they went off, loud cracks of sound and blind­ing white phosphorous.

Sandy fol­lowed his lead and dropped flares, cast­ing the ware­house in a flick­er­ing yellow-​​green glow. Wasn’t as good as night vision, but it would do.

Jack started to get up when another shot pranged over his head, fol­lowed almost imme­di­ately by a rifle crack that echoed back and forth until it was impos­si­ble to deter­mine where it had come from. “Dammit!”

Rufariel was smart, far smarter than Asemiel, the demon they’d killed in the sum­mer. He had been, as it turned out, a rel­a­tively low-​​level func­tionary, and had been undone as much by his own over­con­fi­dence as any­thing Jack or Daniel had done. Now demons had the ben­e­fit of warn­ing, of know­ing that humans could actu­ally kill them if they got lucky. It had already hap­pened a few times, cru­saders in Italy, Africa and Korea. Rufariel hadn’t got­ten this far by being stupid.

“Spread out,” Jack said. “Try to sur­round him before we descend to ground level. And hold on tight.” The rest of the team nod­ded, intu­it­ing what he had in mind, and began belly-​​crawling along the catwalk.

Jack pulled another two grenades out of his fatigues. These weren’t flash-​​bangs, though. He pulled the pin on the first one and flung it straight out, let­ting it fall roughly in the mid­dle of the ware­house. It dis­ap­peared behind the cargo con­tain­ers and det­o­nated with a deaf­en­ing thun­der­clap. The con­tain­ers shook and a mix­ture of dust and smoke bil­lowed out the nar­row metal canyon.

Jack read­ied his rifle and squinted through the haze. He was look­ing for any sign of move­ment, any­thing that might be Rufariel try­ing to get away from the heat and con­cus­sion of the blast. He saw nothing.

Take two, then, he thought. He checked to see where the team was. Sandy, Daniel… and there was Dante. They all had set up near long metal lad­ders in the cor­ners of the build­ing that led from the cat­walk down to the floor. He made eye con­tact with each of them in turn, then held up the sec­ond grenade. They nodded.

He pulled the pin and flung it out a bit far­ther, try­ing to drop it down into the next row out from the one he’d hit. The grenade bounced and skid­ded across the top of the con­tainer and det­o­nated just as it veered out over the edge, maybe forty feet above the floor. The explo­sion wasn’t as buffered by the con­tain­ers this time and Jack was flat­tened down to the cat­walk by the overpressure.

He craned his head over the cat­walk and tried to see any sign of move­ment below. The flares were start­ing to sput­ter, and would have to be replaced. He was reach­ing for his last grenade, another flash-​​bang, when he saw just a hint of movement.

Directly below him.

Jack rolled to the side just as the auto­matic fire strafed the cat­walk where he’d been. He saw a glimpse of a fig­ure run­ning in the smoke under the cat­walk, hug­ging the wall of the warehouse.

“I’ve got him!” Jack shouted. “He’s here!” Granted, he couldn’t even hear him­self over the echoes of gun­fire and the ring­ing still in his ears. He pulled him­self up to a crouch, and duck­walked across the cat­walk in pur­suit. Ahead of him, he saw Sandy con­verg­ing on the same cor­ner. He glanced quickly over his shoul­der, just to ver­ify that Daniel and Dante were already on their way down to the floor to cut off the demon’s escape route. This was going bet­ter than expected.

Sandy fired a quick burst down the lad­der, then started to descend, care­fully and with his weapon trained and ready to return fire if nec­es­sary. Jack had him cov­ered, but could no longer see the demon. Some­thing fur­ther into the ware­house had caught fire, and the smoke was obscur­ing his vision.

Sandy reached the bot­tom of the lad­der, and swept around him in a Weaver stance mod­i­fied for the snub-​​nosed MP-​​5 they used, front hand hold­ing the ver­ti­cal grip of the weapon in front of his trig­ger hand. He did a com­plete 360, but didn’t fire. He looked up at Jack and shrugged.

Jack had just started down the lad­der him­self when he heard bursts of weapon­fire on the other side of the warehouse.

---

Daniel heard the shots, almost deaf­en­ingly close, but didn’t see the shooter. It sounded like one of their H&K’s, but he couldn’t be sure it was Dante. He crept slowly along a row of con­tain­ers, his vision flick­er­ing in an out with the dying flares. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a flare, struck it against his leg and tossed it high over­head, look­ing away from the green arc of light until it landed. Unfor­tu­nately, it didn’t do much more than illu­mi­nate the smoke.

He was just near­ing the cor­ner when he heard Dante shout, “I’ve got him!” and fire off a quick burst from his MP-​​5. Daniel ran for­ward and saw Dante crouched behind a wooden crate. The hacker popped up and fired again.

Daniel tracked to where Dante was fir­ing and saw the demon Rufariel, wear­ing sim­ple work clothes rather than the designer suits Asemiel had favored. The bul­lets from Dante’s gun raked up the body of the demon, and Daniel added his own pair of three-​​round bursts right to the demon’s cen­ter mass. Rufariel fell over back­ward from the kick.

Dante jumped out from behind the crate. “We got him!” he shouted. Daniel was about to tell him to get back behind cover when he heard the demon’s voice behind him.

“My turn.”

Daniel dove behind the cargo con­tainer as Rufariel sprayed auto­matic fire first at him, then back towards Dante. Daniel saw Dante duck back behind the crate.

The demon smiled. He aimed at the crate and opened fire. The bul­lets tore through the wood and Dante cried out before he fell scream­ing to the ground.

Daniel returned fire towards the demon, tried to cross to Dante, was who was wail­ing in pain. The demon held his ground and fired a burst at Daniel, who was forced to retreat to the cover of the steel cargo con­tainer, stur­dier cover than Dante’s wooden crate.

He heard a whoosh and saw a bright flash of orange light over the sickly green flares. He peaked out and saw that Sandy had hit Rufariel with the minia­tur­ized flamethrower he kept strapped to his back. The demon screamed and retreated, but didn’t fall.

“Tend to Dante, doc, I got this,” Sandy said, with a bit less than his usual drawl.

Daniel darted over to Dante. “It’s okay. I’m here, we’re going to get you patched up.” He started check­ing Dante for injuries, but it only took an instant to see where the biggest trou­ble was. A size­able pool of blood had already spread on the dirty con­crete floor under Dante’s left leg.

“Hurts…” Dante said between clenched teeth. Even in the yellow-​​green glow from the flares, he looked notice­ably pale. Already going into shock, Daniel thought. Not good.

He pushed Dante back as gen­tly as time allowed and straight­ened the leg, which set off another round of scream­ing. “Stay with me, Dante,” Daniel said, and reached in his pack. He pulled out a small nylon bag which he unzipped to reveal basic sur­gi­cal tools. He first grabbed a single-​​use injec­tor and pressed it to Dante’s neck.

Pfft. The mor­phine went into Dante’s carotid artery. It didn’t seem to make much dif­fer­ence, but that was what Daniel had to work with.

He grabbed some shears and sliced open the leg of Dante’s fatigues with a quick, well-​​practiced motion. The bul­let hole pierced cleanly through the upper thigh, through and through. So on the upside, no slug to dig out. But blood was spurt­ing out of both sides with every beat of Dante’s heart. Red, oxygen-​​rich arte­r­ial blood.

Shit, Daniel thought. Nicked the femoral artery. He didn’t have much time. Dante had a hole in one of the largest arter­ies in the body, and would bleed out in min­utes if Daniel couldn’t stop it.

Daniel reached for a retrac­tor, the steel teeth gleam­ing green. “This is gonna hurt, buddy,” he said to Dante. He got an inar­tic­u­late moan in return. Daniel jammed the retrac­tor into the wound and spread it, open­ing a chan­nel down to the artery. Dante screamed and pounded the con­crete with his fists.

Daniel peered into the wound, wish­ing he had some lig­a­tion to clear the blood out of the way. It looked worse than he thought. The artery wasn’t nicked at all, it was sev­ered and had retracted up the leg. There was no way to get to in the field. “Shit shit shit…” Daniel said as he reached for a tourniquet.

He wrapped the band around Dante’s upper thigh, hip to crotch. It didn’t fit, the dam­age was too far up the leg. He tight­ened it down any­way, which slowed, but didn’t stop the blood flow. Dante passed out, so at least he didn’t have to deal with a thrash­ing patient.

Mak­ing sure the retrac­tor was secure, he reached for (tong thingy) and reached into the wound. He heard Jack’s voice behind him, but couldn’t tell what he was say­ing, and both Jack and Sandy had seen enough bat­tle­field triage to know not to inter­rupt the medic with stu­pid ques­tions like, “Is he going to make it?” They knew ask­ing those ques­tions vastly increased the chance of a “no.”

Try­ing to fol­low the warmth of the blood, Daniel pushed the (thingy) fur­ther up Dante’s leg as he grabbed a clamp with his other hand. There it is, he thought, feel­ing the end of the gush­ing tube. Slip­pery bastard…

He got a grip on the end of the artery and pulled. Even uncon­scious, Dante moaned. The pain had to be unthink­able. He almost lost it, tight­ened his grip, and finally fished out the artery into the open. He clamped it shut, which both stopped the major bleed and kept the artery from retract­ing up the leg again. Hands drip­ping blood, Daniel grabbed his sutures and a nee­dle. Another minute, and he had the artery sewn shut, good enough to move him to a proper ER, anyway.

He quickly checked for other wounds, but mirac­u­lously, only the one bul­let man­aged to hit Dante through the crate. He’d been lucky, all things considered.

Still on his knees, Daniel said, “We’ve got to get him to a hos­pi­tal. Now.”

“Ambu­lance is already en route,” Jack said.

“And Rufariel?”

“He got away. The EMP didn’t work. He was still immor­tal when we hit him.”

“So all of this was for noth­ing,” Daniel said. He slumped, still kneal­ing in Dante’s blood as the sirens approached.

---

Half an hour later, Jack stood with Daniel and Sandy in the wait­ing room of the ER. Dante had been wheeled in for surgery, but they thought they’d be able to save the leg. So far, that was the only good news of the evening.

All three of them were quiet. The two war vets knew any­thing they said would be trite, and Daniel was lost in his own thoughts. Jack felt for the guy, but was also immensely proud of him. He’d saved Dante’s life back there. He knew Daniel had been a gifted trauma sur­geon until a mis­take cost a woman and her unborn child their lives and him his job. And Jack had seen first­hand on sev­eral occa­sions how Daniel car­ried him­self in a fight against immor­tals. He knew the kid would do great, but what he couldn’t pre­dict was how he’d take such an intense setback.

And they hadn’t even lost Dante. Bat­tle­field medics had to be pre­pared to lose patients. You couldn’t save them all. He’d seen this in some medics in Iraq. Gen­er­ally speak­ing, com­bat docs had one of two looks about them. Steely eyed con­fi­dence because they knew they were the best at their jobs and saved the lives of their com­rades, or a glassy, thou­sand yard stare because they’d seen too many of their own die under their hands. Daniel seemed to be tip­ping to the latter.

“Daniel,” Jack put his hand on Daniel’s shoulder.

“Not now, Jack!” Daniel shook it off and stormed out­side. Jack followed.

“Daniel, you saved him. Dante’s going to be okay.” Jack said, keep­ing his dis­tance, but mak­ing it clear he wasn’t going away, either.

Daniel spun to face him. “What if he didn’t? He almost bled out, Jack. They had to replace over half his blood vol­ume on the way here. Another few sec­onds, even, and — ”

“And noth­ing. You saved him. You did your job.”

“And what is that job, Jack? We’ve been play­ing G.I. Fuck­ing Joe for three months, while those things have been run­ning around free, and the first time we try to take one down, he almost kills one of us. What the hell are we doing, Jack?”

“The EMP didn’t work as we expected — ”

“That’s a fuck­ing understatement.”

“ — but that’s okay. We know not to waste any more time try­ing to attack the nanites them­selves. We’ve just learned one more way not to make a light bulb. Trial and error is part of this job.”

“Except that when we fall on the ‘error’ side some­one almost gets killed. We don’t have time to fuck around like this, Jack, and we def­i­nitely can’t afford to spare the bodies.”

“Dante’s still with us, Daniel. He can do most of his job out­side direct com­bat anyway — ”

“Were you even there, tonight, man? Rufariel could have slaugh­tered all four of us and then gone to get a burger. We didn’t even slow him down. He was toy­ing with Dante, Jack. I saw it. He was hav­ing fun. If the demon had really wanted us all dead, we’d be just like your bud­dies in the FBI.”

Jack said noth­ing. The com­ment stung, but Daniel was right. It could have been much, much worse. Instead Jack stood there in the cold night wind, and waited for Daniel to get the rant out of his system.

“This is fuck­ing stu­pid,” Daniel said. “Try­ing to kill the demons one by one, in direct com­bat, what the hell were we thinking?”

Jack didn’t respond.

“No, really, Jack, I’m ask­ing. What were we think­ing? We’d nar­rowly avoid­ing get­ting killed by Asemiel, sev­eral times over, and since then we’ve learned he was the fuck­ing Bar­ney Fife of demons. How in hell did we ever believe that we could take on demons play­ing their A game?”

“Because we don’t have a choice, Daniel. If you have a bet­ter idea, I’d love to hear it. But until you come up with one, fight­ing them one on one is all we can do. We try, we take our chances, be as smart about it as pos­si­ble, and learn from our mis­takes. No one has ever, in recorded his­tory, fought them directly before. We’re the first. So we have to learn as we go.”

“And get peo­ple killed.” Jack noticed that Daniel still had Dante’s blood all over him. We need to have changes of clothes handy, he thought.

“Yeah, Daniel. Some­times we will get peo­ple killed. Some­times inno­cents, some­times one of us. But that’s the price we pay.”

“There has got to be another way.”

Jack was reach­ing the edge of his patience, but hadn’t gone over yet. Every new­bie went through this. To Daniel’s credit, they usu­ally threw up too, after their first real action, but Jack fig­ured Daniel got past that part when he’d been an ER doc.

“Daniel, this is the only way we have. And I don’t need to tell you how vital our job is. You know why we’re here. What’s at stake. You know bet­ter than any­one. With­out the demons, your fam­ily would still be alive and you’d still be try­ing to be invis­i­ble in D. C.”

“Fuck you, Jack. They make you do a psych rota­tion, you know. I know what you’re doing bet­ter than you do. Want me to explain how that kind of manip­u­la­tion works on a neu­ro­log­i­cal level?”

“If it will get you past this and back on track, sure. Go right ahead.”

“So that’s it? You want to just go right back to work in the morn­ing like this didn’t hap­pen? Like Dante didn’t almost die?”

“No,” Jack said. “I want us to go back to work tomor­row morn­ing like Dante didn’t die. Because he didn’t. He’s still alive, and that’s thanks to you. But if you can’t get past this, if you can’t put a close call — and that’s all this was — aside and do the job, then maybe we can’t use you. You’re a gifted medic and a good fighter, and no one has more expe­ri­ence with immor­tals than you, but we need your head in the game.”

“I’ll see you in the morn­ing, Jack,” Daniel said, and stalked away into the night.

1 Vows

Daniel Cho stood in the cold San Fran­cisco breeze and stared at the graves of his family.

It had been three months since they died, and yet this was the first time he’d been able to get back home to visit. And even then, he wasn’t here on per­sonal time, but instead here on a mis­sion, or an op, as Jack called them.

He’d spent the last three months train­ing, going through a rig­or­ous boot camp with Dante Hicks, the team’s “triple C” — Communications, Com­mand and Con­trol — spe­cial­ist. Jack and Sandy, the two war vet­er­ans on the team, had run them ragged and drilled with them over and over the kinds of sit­u­a­tions they would face, so that when they got there for real, every­thing would be on automatic.

Only Daniel knew all too well that there was no way to pre­pare for this. Not really. They were hunt­ing demons.

The world had changed since Susan’s rev­e­la­tion about the exis­tence of a thou­sands of immor­tals, beings split into two camps we had come to think of as angels and demons. That these immor­tals had manip­u­lated and guided the devel­op­ment of human soci­eties, pulling the strings behind the scenes for longer than recorded history.

The demons had tried to stop them, of course. And when they couldn’t reach Daniel, they went after his fam­ily. Two demons had entered the apart­ments above the neigh­bor­hood gro­cery store that had been the fam­ily busi­ness, snapped his father’s neck and then raped and mur­dered his sis­ters while they forced his mother to watch. They recorded the whole thing on video and released it to the web. Daniel got to see his mother die as the Cho Gro­cery burned to the ground. There was no doubt what hap­pened, no doubt at all.

Daniel was con­vinced that the deaths of his fam­ily were his fault, ulti­mately. He had pro­voked this immor­tal con­spir­acy into act­ing when he kept pur­su­ing the truth behind a dead man walk­ing away from a fatal wreck. He had killed the immor­tal in ques­tion him­self, fling­ing him into a vat of molten steel in Beth­le­hem, Penn­syl­va­nia. Of course they would respond. Why didn’t he see that com­ing? Not a day had gone by since that Daniel didn’t blame him­self for their deaths.

Now, at least he was ready to make a dif­fer­ence. As he stood alone in the ceme­tery, he was already dressed in the black mil­i­tary fatigues worn by most of the mem­bers of the Cru­sade. It was a loose orga­ni­za­tion, sprung up in the wake of the rev­e­la­tion. They had no lead­ers, and each team was autonomous. There was no way for the demons to track them or dis­rupt them. The Cru­sade against the demons had learned from the best, al Qaida and other ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tions that the demons, iron­i­cally, had sup­ported for so many cen­turies. And now it was time foot fight fire with fire. To take the fight to that enemy.

Most of the demons had gone to ground after the rev­e­la­tion. Some changed their iden­ti­ties, some con­tested the rev­e­la­tion, tried to declare them­selves fully human. Some­times it worked, some times it didn’t.

But the demon they were after now, the demon they’d come to kill, was brazen. He admit­ted what he was and went to ground, start­ing a series of bomb­ings him­self that had the area in shock.

Offi­cially, he was human, just a domes­tic ter­ror­ist. The gov­ern­ment was still deny­ing the exis­tence of demons. But Jack had heard through back chan­nels, old friends in the FBI, that Rufariel had already killed two of the teams sent to cap­ture him. The FBI wasn’t pre­pared for this. Not as long as they believed they were fight­ing a human.

Daniel knew better.

---

Susan Richard­son was in a hurry. She was in the back of a cab, rac­ing across mid­town Manhattan.

And by rac­ing, the cab was speed­ing for half a block, screech­ing to a halt, weav­ing around traf­fic, try­ing to build up speed again, wav­ing some more, et cetera. It was slowly dri­ving Susan insane.

She had a broad­cast to do, dammit. Night had fully fallen in New York, and she was sup­posed to be live on the air at eleven.

The car screeched to a stop, and Susan flung a wadded up twenty at the dri­ver. “Get­ting out here!” she shouted as she jumped out of the cab. She hitched her lap­top bag tight on her shoul­der and started pow­er­walk­ing east, in the direc­tion of Rock­e­feller Cen­ter, and the stu­dios of Fox News.

In truth, her new life felt a lit­tle sur­real to her, even with full acknowl­edg­ment of what she’d been through since June. If any­one had told her in May that six months later she’d be a New York Times best­selling author and have her own show on America’s biggest cable news net­work, she’d have laughed in their face. Then asked for some of what they were drinking.

But here she was. Her book, The Rev­e­la­tion: Proof That Angels And Demons Walk Among Us was still sell­ing out. Her show didn’t have O’Reilly or Beck rat­ings — yet — but it was on later, oppo­site brain-​​numbing late night talk­shows on the major net­works. She’d move up. Choos­ing to do a story on Daniel Cho had been the best deci­sion of her life.

Susan blasted past a knot of home­less on and , get­ting a firmer grip on her bag and veer­ing out of arm’s reach as she did. She checked her phone. Four­teen mes­sages from her pro­ducer ask­ing where she was. She pecked out a quick “OMW” on the key­board and broke into a jog past the grid­locked cars.

Not that every­one believed her report­ing, she reminded her­self. She still had a long way to go to get to what she wanted. She was going to be the next Glenn Beck, the next Rush Lim­baugh. Her agent was still nego­ti­at­ing the deal for a nation­ally syn­di­cated radio show, but had made it clear to Susan that before that was real­is­ti­cally going to hap­pen, she had to break into the main­stream. Her fol­low­ers were a vibrant and vocal minor­ity, but still a minor­ity just the same. Too many peo­ple were still in denial of the truth, no mat­ter how much proof she’d provided.

The gov­ern­ment wasn’t help­ing, of course. Not con­tent to let his flunkies trash her, even Pres­i­dent Cruz him­self had said on national TV that there was no such thing as immor­tals, that Susan’s ros­ter of demons was just a pub­lic­ity stunt. She’d been tempted to start a rumor that Ricardo Alessan­dro Cruz was him­self a demon, given that a quar­ter of the nation already believed the Miami-​​born politi­cian had really been born and raised in Cuba as a sleeper agent. But no, that would have been coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. Ther­a­peu­tic, but coun­ter­pro­duc­tive. The truth was on her side, and that should be all she needed.

In fact, the truth was why she was run­ning late today. An old man had con­tacted her through her web­site and said he’d had some­thing she should see, some­thing the Russ­ian gov­ern­ment had so far been able to keep off of YouTube. She found him in a run down apart­ment in , the place smelling of borsch and old sweat. He showed her a video clip that had been smug­gled to him by rel­a­tives in Rus­sia, and Susan had rushed to get a copy on her USB drive. She texted her pro­ducer that she’d be run­ning late, and to leave the first seg­ment of the show open that night. She had a surprise.

It was great, but first she had to get there. Susan darted across , flip­ping the bird at a cab that nar­rowly avoided hit­ting her, and saw the out­lines of 30 Rock in the dis­tance. Almost there. Let’s see the Cruz admin­is­tra­tion deny this, she thought.

---

Night had fallen in San Fran­cisco, and still Daniel stood motion­less at his family’s graves. He heard a famil­iar thwup­ping of rotors behind him, the wind shift­ing as the black UH-​​60 Black­hawk heli­copter he didn’t have to turn and see set­tled down behind him.

He heard a sin­gle set of foot­falls walk up behind him. Must have left Sandy and Dante in the chop­per, Daniel thought.

With­out a word, Jack Har­ris stopped next to him, stand­ing at a respect­ful parade rest. Jack had been an Army offi­cer in Iraq before he’d been an FBI agent, and some things never changed.

After a minute or so, Jack spoke. “I’m sorry we didn’t get you out here sooner.”

“The mis­sion comes first,” Daniel said. It had been one of the first things they’d all agreed to. The Demonic Cru­sade they were a part of was a move­ment, not an orga­ni­za­tion. Some things, like their gear and travel, was bankrolled by the Archangel Uriel, or more specif­i­cally one of his shell cor­po­ra­tions, but they had no lead­ers, no hier­ar­chy. Jack was the de facto squad leader in com­bat, but that was because of expe­ri­ence rather than author­ity. They all bought into the mis­sion, that the demons had to be exter­mi­nated, and the gov­ern­ments of the world weren’t pre­pared to do that. Daniel believed that. But that didn’t mean he had to like it.

“Still,” Jack said, with­out adding any more. There wasn’t much to say. Daniel’s fam­ily hadn’t had a funeral for him to miss, as they all deemed that too entic­ing a tar­get for demons to go after Daniel as well. They were ded­i­cated to fight­ing the demons, but it wouldn’t be on the demons’ terms.

“We’ve got a lock on . Tracked him to a ware­house in . But we don’t know how long he’ll — ”

Daniel turned on his heel and strode towards the chop­per. Jack didn’t fin­ish his sen­tence and followed.

It was time to kill a demon. The first they’d located since fin­ish­ing their train­ing. The first of many.

The mis­sion was on.

---

“Where the hell have you been?” Marty asked Susan as she raced across the studio.

“Doing my job,” she said as she tossed the USB flash drive to him. “Get that ready to broad­cast on my cue.”

She sat down at her anchor’s desk in front of the cam­era, just a few min­utes before eleven. The makeup artist, who had been chas­ing her since she walked in the door, hur­riedly tried to make her look like she hadn’t just run across mid­town Man­hat­tan. It was a los­ing bat­tle, and he harumphed at her until she shooed him away.

She got her notes set in front of her, includ­ing the ones she’d scrawled in the cab, then looked up to see Marty wav­ing wildly at her. He held up a count. 3… 2… Showtime.

“Good evening,” she said into the cam­era. “I’m Susan Richard­son and this is Demonwatch.”

The red light dis­ap­peared off Cam­era 1 and lit over Cam­era 2. She turned to face it.

“Tonight we’re going to lead with some break­ing news, a sur­prise the pow­ers that be don’t want you to see. In my book,” she knew Marty would be fast enough to put up an over­lay of her book cover and a link to her web­site where peo­ple could buy it, “I revealed that one of the demons wasn’t hid­ing at all, but run­ning a first world coun­try right out in the open. I revealed that Vladimir Putin had once been known as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler, the inspi­ra­tion for Drac­ula. And that he had, in fact, been Grig­ori Rasputin before the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917.”

Back to Cam­era 1. “The Russ­ian gov­ern­ment, of course, has flatly denied these alle­ga­tions. The Cruz admin­is­tra­tion here in our own coun­try has denied these allegations.”

Marty cut to a clip of Pres­i­dent Cruz. “I’ve met Prime Min­is­ter Putin sev­eral times, and there’s noth­ing demonic about him. He is a heck of an ath­lete, though.” The pres­i­dent chuck­led, laugh­ing off the mere thought that a world leader could be an immortal.

Back to Susan. “Tonight have star­tling footage to show you, recently smug­gled out of Rus­sia. The pow­ers that be don’t want you to see this, but you deserve the truth. I’m obliged to warn you, how­ever, that what you’re about to see is graphic and disturbing.”

She nod­ded almost imper­cep­ti­bly at Marty, and he played the clip she’d spent the after­noon and evening track­ing down.

The clip was jumpy and ragged, clearly taken from a cell phone and covertly. The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter was clearly vis­i­ble, walk­ing across an air­port tar­mac sur­rounded by aides and per­sonal secu­rity, pri­vate jets vis­i­ble in the back­ground. One of the secu­rity men looked directly at the cam­era, nod­ded, and see­ing the ver­i­fi­ca­tion he was clearly look­ing for, drew his weapon and shot Putin in the head, point blank.

The other secu­rity men tack­led the shooter, but the cam­era­man kept his cell phone pointed at Putin. The Prime Min­is­ter had dropped, of course, when half his skull blew off, but even as the shooter was wres­tled to the ground, the cam­era­man caught Putin’s head vis­i­bly knit­ting itself back together. The cam­era­man was pushed back by secu­rity along with the other aides and exec­u­tive per­son­nel. The audio was shout­ing in Russ­ian along with sta­tic and rustling sounds as the cameraman’s phone was jos­tled in his cloth­ing. The view swung away sharply, show­ing empty tar­mac with the open plains of Siberia in the back­ground, then back to Putin, whose head was nearly reassembled.

The Russ­ian Prime Min­is­ter gasped a huge lung­ful of air and rose to his feet, his hair grow­ing out of the newly reformed skin. He walked over to the scruff and shouted some­thing in Russ­ian. One of the secu­rity men not hold­ing down the shooter unhol­stered his pis­tol and handed it to Putin, who shot a sin­gle round into the orig­i­nal shooter’s fore­head. Just as he started to turn towards the cam­era, the video stopped.

Marty pointed at Susan, indi­cat­ing that the cam­era was back on her. “What you’ve just seen,” Susan said, “is hid­den cam­era footage prov­ing, with­out a doubt, that Vladimir Putin is in fact an immor­tal demon. We ask our friends in Rus­sia to do what’s right and take their coun­try back from this God­less mon­ster. And we ask our own Pres­i­dent Cruz to finally acknowl­edge the threat immor­tals pose to our own free­dom and secu­rity, before some­thing like this hap­pens here.

“We’ll be right back.” The net­work cut to commercial.

1: New Beginning

[Dante Hicks is now Patrick Russell.]Daniel Cho stood in the frigid bay wind and stared at the graves of his par­ents and his sis­ters. It was Sep­tem­ber, three months after their deaths at the hands of the demons. Their estate han­dling had been done remotely because he’d spent the last three months prepar­ing to avenge them. Today was the first day he’d actu­ally been free to visit their graves.

He hardly rec­og­nized the man he’d been when they died. In the last three months, Jack and Sandy had run him and Patrick through a bru­tal “boot camp” to pre­pare non-​​combatant civil­ians for the bat­tle ahead. They’d been whipped into the best phys­i­cal shape of their lives, taught how to sur­vive in wilder­nesses from the Appalachian moun­tains to South­East Wash­ing­ton DC.  They’d been taught how kill with guns, knives and their bare hands. Daniel was the equal now of the best US Army Rangers, and had also refreshed his skills as a trauma sur­geon. Those were skills his team was likely to need, con­sid­er­ing what they’d be fighting.

Demons. Not the horned and pitch­fork vari­ety, but real, flesh and blood peo­ple who, as the result of nan­otech­nol­ogy no one had fig­ured out yet, healed almost instantly, never got sick, never aged. They’d been liv­ing among humans for cen­turies – mil­len­nia – and inter­fer­ing in the devel­op­ment of soci­ety, cor­rupt­ing and poi­son­ing things for their own ends. Wher­ever there was blood, strife, humans killing each oth­ers, there were demons behind the scenes.

Daniel had stum­bled upon their exis­tence and they’d tried to kill him for it. When that didn’t work, they’d killed his fam­ily. But in the end, Daniel and his friends had been able to get the truth out. The demons weren’t a secret anymore.

But nei­ther were they acknowl­edged fact. The demons had caught the col­lec­tive imag­i­na­tion of the pub­lic, but the United States gov­ern­ment, along with most of the United Nations, still declared them a hoax. Daniel knew that this was because the demons had influ­ence deep within the gov­ern­ments of the world. Even Jack’s for­mer boss at the FBI had been work­ing for them. Offi­cially, an ancient con­spir­acy of immor­tals med­dling with human his­tory was every bit the wacko con­spir­acy the­ory it sounded like.

Only it was real. Jeff had died to bring the story to light, one of many wacko con­spir­acy the­o­ries he had favored. Only this one was real. The demons existed, whether they were acknowl­edged offi­cially or not.

And they would be hunted. Jack’s team but just one of many the angels had started up in the last few months. The angels still hadn’t, for the most part, shown them­selves. Only Uriel had been seen in pub­lic. But they’d thrown their con­sid­er­able resources behind the human effort to seek out and destroy the demons, once and for all.

Daniel knew the mis­sion was impor­tant. He believed, as Jack did, that human­ity needed to be free. But really, he just wanted to destroy the crea­tures that had taken his fam­ily away from him. He wanted jus­tice. If he couldn’t get it from his gov­ern­ment, he’d take it himself.

“Are you ready?” Jack said behind him.

Jack turned and saw his new boss, both of them wear­ing jeans and leather jack­ets against the fall chill. They didn’t look much like sol­diers. But Jack had fought in Iraq, along­side Sandy, before he joined the FBI. And while Patrick hadn’t been tested under fire yet, Daniel had fought the demon Batarel five times before finally killing the bas­tard, the last time just hand to hand, flip­ping the demon off a cat­walk in a steel plant into a vat of molten metal. So far, he was the only human to kill an immor­tal in all of recorded his­tory. That had to count for something.

Daniel didn’t look back at his family’s graves. “Yeah, boss. I’m ready.”

“Let’s sad­dle up, then.” Jack turned and led Daniel to the UH-​​60 Black­hawk they used to move around. They hadn’t come to San Fran­cisco just so Daniel could say good­bye to his fam­ily. They were hunt­ing. After Susan released the data­base given to her by Uriel with all the names and aliases of every demon, includ­ing their cur­rent iden­ti­ties, most of them had gone to ground, assumed emer­gency backup iden­ti­ties. It had taken a lot of leg­work and Patrick’s com­puter skills, but they found one, liv­ing in the bay area. It was time to take him down.

*

Jack sat in the cock­pit of the Black­hawk, going over the mis­sion details one more time. Sandy was pilot­ing, and Daniel was in the back with Patrick, try­ing to get Patrick’s lit­tle sur­prise ready. While he and Sandy had been teach­ing the young ana­lyst to fight, they’d also been pick­ing his brain about how to kill demons more effec­tively. They couldn’t very well carry around a vat of molten steel every­where they went, so they needed another way to kill some­thing that could heal almost any injury in sec­onds. Patrick had come up with a lot of ideas, includ­ing the one they were going to field test today. Just as soon as they found the demon.

Accord­ing to their sources, the demon, true name of Oznael, was holed up in ware­house down in Hunter’s Point. Seemed as good a place as any to test out their tactics.

Sandy sig­naled him. They were almost at the LZ. Out the port side he saw the blue of San Fran­cisco Bay, gray indus­trial build­ings below and to star­board. They were com­ing in fast.

Jack turned and sig­naled to Daniel and Patrick. They moved to turn off all their elec­tron­ics. Jack started shut­ting down every­thing he could in the cock­pit with­out inter­fer­ing with Sandy keep­ing the bird in the air. They’d have to be quick.

Sandy pointed at a build­ing, started a count­down with his hand. Five, four, three…

The instant the Black­hawk hit the roof, Jack and Sandy scram­bled to shut down the remain­ing elec­tron­ics. They had three sec­onds. Two, one…

Dante hit the EMP and Jack heard a loud pop from the back of the Black­hawk. All the con­trol screens were black. He glanced at Sandy. “Did we make it?”

“Won’t know until we try to start it again.”

Jack shrugged. They had other con­cerns at the moment. “Let’s move, everybody!”

The men jumped out of the Black­hawk, rotors still swing­ing above their heads from sheer momen­tum. They ran for the roof access door, Jack spray­ing the door­knob with bul­lets from his MP5. He kicked the door down and they rode it like a surf­board down the first flight of steps before jump­ing off in the land­ing and con­tin­u­ing down. The stair­case opened out into a cat­walk above a ware­house floor. The lights were off, a side effect of the eletro­mag­netic pulse they’d set off. If they were lucky, the nanites in the demon’s blood would be dis­abled as well.

They fanned out across the cat­walks along the north and west sides of the build­ing. Each man was dressed in black cov­er­alls, com­bat boots and bul­let­proof vests. They wore kevlar hel­mets and could have passed for SWAT offi­cers but for the lack of the word POLICE in bright white let­ters on their vests. Each car­ried an MP-​​5 sub­ma­chine gun, plenty of ammo, grenades, and a light back­pack con­tain­ing the tools of their spe­cialty. Sandy car­ried hand­held napalm bombs and other ordi­nance. Daniel had their med­ical kit, Patrick a com­puter that could con­nect to just about any­thing any­time some­one hadn’t just set off an EMP. Jack’s back­pack held sur­veil­lance gear, and he reached into that pack to pull out a light­weight set of night vision gog­gles. He put them on.

The ware­house flared into a mono­chrome gray, brighter and bet­ter detailed than what he’d been able to make out by eye. He was the spot­ter in this sce­nario, direct­ing the other men towards the tar­get. If they could find the tar­get. The ware­house was full of eighty foot ship­ping con­tain­ers, some stacked five high. A sin­gle demon could hide in here for a long time with­out being spot­ted, espe­cially if he could get into one or more of the containers.

Jack saw some­thing dart off to the side on the ware­house floor. He whis­tled to the men, and pointed. “South­east cor­ner!” he said.

Care­fully, they all started down the metal stair­ways towards the floor. Patrick had formed up with Jack, Daniel was cov­er­ing Sandy. With any luck, they’d catch the bas­tard in a crossfire.

Jack turned and glanced at Patrick. “You sure this is going to work?”

The for­mer FBI ana­lyst shrugged. “In the­ory, it should work,” Patrick said. “The nanites are too small to have any appre­cia­ble EM shield­ing. The EMP should have turned Oznael into just another human being, at least for a while. If we shoot him, he should stay dead.”

“That’s an awful lot of “shoulds”, Patrick.”

“I know, sir.”

They crept down the floor. As soon as Jack stepped down to the con­crete, he heard the dis­tinc­tive chat­ter of an AK-​​47. He grabbed Patrick by the scruff of the neck and threw them both to the floor. Bul­lets ric­o­cheted off the metal stair­case behind them.

“I think he’s on to us, sir,” Patrick said.

“Fig­ured that out, did you?” Jack said as heard answer­ing MP-​​5 fire com­ing from the left. Good, Sandy was already try­ing to pin him down.

He slapped Patrick on the shoul­der. “Come on, Patrick. We have a job to do.”

Patrick cov­ered Jack as Jack care­fully side­stepped around the ship­ping con­tainer where he thought the AK shots had come from. Sandy and Daniel were no longer fir­ing, so they must have lost Oznael too, assum­ing they ever saw him and weren’t just shoot­ing at the sound to drive him back.

“Oznael!” Jack shouted, echo­ing in the vast ware­house. “We know who and what you are. There’s no way out of here except through us!”

“Sir is that wise?” Patrick whis­pered. “Taunt­ing him?”

“If he hides,” Jack whis­pered, “and we have to search crate by crate, it’s much more dan­ger­ous and we have a higher risk of los­ing him. He thinks he’s invul­ner­a­ble still, and is only avoid­ing us because it’s eas­ier to pick us off one by one. If we can make him angry enough to charge us…”

“He’ll run right into the bul­lets, think­ing they won’t harm him.”

“That’s the plan,” Jack said. “Now we just need to flush him out.”

Jack turned on the com­link hooked over his right ear. “Sandy, report,” he said as qui­etly as he could.

“Noth­ing here, boss,” Sandy said. We con­verged on where it sounded like the AK fire came from, but there’s no sign of him.”

“Roger that,” Jack said. He waved for Patrick to fol­low and moved down the aisle between the mas­sive con­tain­ers. Bas­tard had to be here somewhere.

“Oznael!” he said. “You’re not get­ting out of this.”

Jack heard the demon speak behind them, a rough Aussie accent. “I beg to differ.”

Oznael opened fire, and Jack felt a cou­ple of the rounds hit the plate on the back of his vest. Patrick cried out and went down immediately.

“Shit,” Jack said and returned fire. He hit the demon square in the chest with at least five rounds. The demon fell down under the hail of gunfire.

“Medic!” Jack screamed. “Daniel, get over here!” Jack saw a pool of blood spread­ing under Patrick, and it was get­ting way too big.

As he heard Sandy and Daniel dou­ble­time over to him, he saw the demon get­ting back up.

*

Daniel saw Patrick slumped against the side of a con­tainer as Jack leaped over him and opened fire on the demon again. “Sandy, I need some help here!” Jack said.

As Sandy and Jack drove the demon back, Daniel whipped off his pack and tended to Patrick. “Stay with me, buddy,” he said. “We’re gonna get through this.”

“F – First time out,” Patrick said. “And I get tagged.”

“Could have hap­pened to any of us,” Daniel said. He saw that most of the bleed­ing was com­ing from Patrick’s left leg. Daniel took a knife and sliced open the leg of Patrick’s pants. The bul­let had gone deep into his thigh, and the blood com­ing out was bright red, arte­r­ial. Prob­a­bly nicked the femoral, Daniel thought.

“Okay, Patrick, this is going to sting a bit,” Daniel said. He grabbed a clamp out of his pack, and a retrac­tor. “Got to do a lit­tle spelunking.”

“In my leg?”

“Just lie back and think of Eng­land,” Daniel said. “Don’t pass out if you can help it.”

“I’m get­ting dizzy, Daniel.”

Daniel reached in with the retrac­tor and pulled the wound open. Patrick screamed and thrashed.

“Patrick! Keep still!”

“Fuck!” Patrick said through clenched teeth.

There was blood every­where, pump­ing hot over Daniel’s hands. But he could see where it com­ing from. He reached in with the clamp, and closed it over the artery.

“Shit!” Patrick said. “Fuck­ing Christ, that hurts!”

Daniel broke an ice pack and put it over the wound. “Hold that there as long as you can. I’ve stopped the life threat­en­ing bleed­ing, but we need to get you to an OR as soon as pos­si­ble.” He wrapped some ban­dages over the ice pack. “I’ll be right back.”

Daniel grabbed his weapon, jumped up and ran towards the gunfire.

*

Jack emp­tied his clip, ejected it, and slammed another one home. Oznael was off bal­ance from the con­tin­ued gun­fire, but he was heal­ing vis­i­bly. They had him backed up and pinned down, but Jack didn’t see how they were going to keep this going. As soon as they ran out of ammo, the demon would coun­ter­at­tack and it would be over. They needed a lot more prac­tice before try­ing to take one of these things down.

Jack heard another SMG open up behind him, and saw Daniel adding his fire­power. He was fir­ing in three-​​round bursts, focus­ing on the demon’s knees.

“Good think­ing!” Jack shouted. “Sandy, we need some heat!”

Sandy pulled back and reached behind him. He pulled out what was essen­tially a small flare attached to a plas­tic con­tainer of jel­lied gaso­line. It was a slightly more sophis­ti­cated ver­sion of a Molo­tov Cock­tail, in that it used napalm instead of gas or kerosene, but it would do the job. Sandy lit it and tossed it just above the demon. The flare ignited the napalm, which melted the plas­tic and rained down on the demon, In an instant, the demon was cov­ered in fire. Oznael turned and ran, faster than Jack thought pos­si­ble, for one of the ware­house exits.

“Won’t kill him,” Sandy said, “but it will take him out of com­mis­sion long enough for us to evac.”

“Let’s do it, then,” Jack said. Daniel already had a col­lapsi­ble stretcher unpacked and unfolded. They set about mov­ing Patrick to the stretcher as gen­tly as pos­si­ble, and then car­ried him to the near­est staircase.

The first bat­tle in the war against the demons hadn’t exactly been a rous­ing success.

30: The Hunt Begins

“Assis­tant Direc­tor Gottlieb’s office,” Stacy said.

“Hi, Stacy, it’s Jack. Can you put me through to Lou?”

Lou’s sec­re­tary low­ered her voice. “You out of your frickin’ mind call­ing here? Lou’s really pissed, Jack.”

“I know, Stacy, but offi­cially, I still work for the guy. I’ve been back in coun­try for a week and I need to report in.”

“Your funeral,” she said, and put Jack on hold. Lou picked up just a cou­ple sec­onds later.

“Do you have any idea,” he said, “what the fuck you’ve done, Jack?”

Prob­a­bly bet­ter than you do, Jack thought. “Apart from uncov­er­ing an ancient conspiracy — “

“Spare me, Jack” Lou said. “No one gives a shit but you and the whack­a­dos you’ve fallen in with.”

“The media doesn’t seem to agree with you, Lou.”

“We’ll have the media under con­trol soon enough. They’re champ­ing at the bit now, but they’ll fade in time. Six months from now, every­one will have for­got­ten you and your lit­tle rev­e­la­tion. The only rea­son you and the rest were allowed back on US soil was that deny­ing you entry would have lent cred­i­bil­ity to Richardson’s story.

“You’ve always been an ide­al­ist, Jack. You have no idea how the world really works. It’s not like your bud­dies in the mil­i­tary. This is the real world. You have to be flexible.”

“And by flex­i­ble, you mean sell me out to demons?”

Lou laughed, an angry lit­tle sound. “Call ‘em what you like, Jack. They hold the power, and the rest of us do what we’re told. Sides don’t mat­ter, Jack. Get past the names and it’s all the same.”

Keep talk­ing, Jack said. He glanced over at Dante, who spun his fin­ger in the air. Keep going.

“I thought you were a patriot,” Jack said.

“Jack, I would think you of all peo­ple would under­stand. There are no patri­ots. There are sur­vivors, and there’s you. I’m a survivor.”

Dante gave Jack a thumbs up. Time to pull the plug.

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am to hear that,” Jack said. “And you may as well call off the agents you have con­verg­ing on my loca­tion in Sil­ver Springs. The one you’ve traced this call to? I’m not actu­ally there.”

Lou sput­tered.

“I called to ten­der my res­ig­na­tion,” Jack said. “Well, mine and Ana­lyst Hicks. We’re both going to be pur­su­ing other opportunities.”

“You bas­tard,” Lou said. “You can’t quit. You’re fired.”

“What­ever helps you sleep at night, Lou. And don’t bother clean­ing up after your­self. Agent Hicks pig­gy­backed off this call into the FBI net­work and down­loaded the secu­rity tapes of you allow­ing in those two demons, along with footage of what they tried to do in the lab. We’ll be releas­ing those to the media presently.”

Lou said noth­ing, but Jack enjoyed the shade of red he knew that his now for­mer boss’s face must be.

“So long, Lou. Pray to what­ever god you actu­ally believe in that you don’t see me again.”

#

Susan tabbed over to see look at the lat­est traf­fic stats again. New Amer­i­can Cen­tury, now under her con­trol, was blow­ing up. Dante had set up the new blog on a server that scaled to incom­ing traf­fic demands, and the hits just kept going up and up and up.

In a way, deny­ing her story was the best thing the gov­ern­ment could have done for her. For some rea­son, the pub­lic had been con­di­tioned to believe the oppo­site of what their elected rep­re­sen­ta­tives told them. So when they were told by Peo­ple In Author­ity that this was all a hoax, that demons weren’t real, then the pub­lic believed the Susan was indeed on to something.

She was still writ­ing fol­low up arti­cles, analy­sis and reply­ing to thou­sands of com­ments. Uriel had assured her that she was safe against any direct reprisals from the demons, and she had no rea­son to doubt his word. So she sat in her apart­ment and rode the wave for all it was worth.

She made sure to star all the requests for inter­views in her inbox. Now that she was safely back in the US, all the major net­works wanted to get her in stu­dio for on-​​camera inter­views. Susan felt it was a great oppor­tu­nity to test drive the net­works and see where she wanted to land when all this was over.

She jot­ted down a note to call Daniel later. She knew he was still griev­ing for his fam­ily, and she needed to cheer him up. She shouldn’t be the only one to ben­e­fit from what they’d gone through.

#

Daniel sat in his apart­ment and stared. He wasn’t star­ing at any­thing in par­tic­u­lar, just the way the end table butted up against the wall. He had a day’s growth of beard on his chin, and was wear­ing the same clothes he’d worn the day before, the clothes he put on after that shower in Frankfurt.

His boss had assured him his old job was wait­ing for him, but to take his time. He didn’t want Daniel to rush into things before he was ready. Daniel knew that his boss was hes­i­tant to take him back at all, and that the angels had leaned on him. He could hear it in his voice. The same tone peo­ple used when talk­ing to the men­tally unstable.

But wasn’t that what he was, now? What he’d been for quite some time, if he was hon­est with him­self? He knew how ridicu­lous it sounded. That he, who trained to be a healer, would be fol­lowed around by death? Not his death, but the death of any­one near him, any­one whose life he touched. It wasn’t what he wanted. But it was what he was.

He was the angel of death.

Daniel shook his head. I really am tip­ping over the edge, he thought as he got up and walked into the kitchen for another beer. It was only mid-​​morning, but he told him­self the sun was over the yardarm somewhere.

He heard a knock on the door as he was walk­ing back to his recliner. The sound star­tled him because it was unex­pected. He’d expected to be over­whelmed by paparazzi when he got home, but things had been oddly quiet. No one called to bother him. No one camped out in front of his apart­ment. He sup­posed he had the angels to thank for that, but he wasn’t in the mood to thank any­one for anything.

He walked over and opened the door. He saw Jack stand­ing in his door­way, once again dressed in his “G-​​man” black suit. He only needed a fedora to com­plete the look. Over Jack’s shoul­der he saw a black Crown Vic con­tain­ing Sandy and Dante, both sim­i­larly attired.

“Jack,” he said. He kept his voice neutral.

“Daniel, it’s good to see you,” Jack said. “Do you mind if I come in?”

“Be my guest.”

Daniel trudged back to his chair and sat down.

Jack walked in, shut the door. “Daniel, we need your help.”

“Again?”

“More like still,” Jack said, tak­ing a seat on the couch across from Daniel. “I’m not with the FBI anymore.”

“Wardrobe notwith­stand­ing.”

“I know you’re tired,” Jack said.

“That’s an understatement.”

“And I know you would rather go the rest of your days with­out see­ing another immor­tal, but we need you.”

“We, in this case, being you, Sandy and Dante out in the car?”

“Among oth­ers,” Jack said. “Geez, what I’m about to say still sounds ridicu­lous, even to me. But you’re one of the few peo­ple who would under­stand. We’re cre­at­ing a task force to take down the demons. We’re going to hunt them down and destroy them, every sin­gle one of them.”

Daniel raised an eye­brow. “You and what army?”

“We’re build­ing an army,” Jack said. “That’s why I’m here. I want you on my team.”

“You want me to fight even more demons, on purpose?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Go to hell, Jack.”

Jack’s head dropped. “Daniel, I know what you’ve been through. I was there.”

“Were you?” Daniel said. “Were you in my fam­ily home in San Fran­cisco when the demons burned it to the ground with my fam­ily still in it? Were you there when they raped my sis­ters? When they made my mother watch?”

“I begged you not to watch that video.”

“I’m an alba­tross, Jack. I’m the angel of fuck­ing death. I’m a doc­tor who not only man­ages to kill his patients, I man­age to get any­one killed who’s dumb enough to get close to me. You don’t want me on your team.”

“Yes, I do, Daniel. We’re plan­ning on four man units, small and nim­ble. Each man will fight, but we’ll also have other mis­sion sup­port spe­cial­ties. Sandy is ordi­nance and pro­cure­ment, I’m intel­li­gence, Dante’s triple C. We need a medic. And I hap­pen to know some­one who’s not just a tal­ented trauma sur­geon, but also is the only known human to kill one of these bas­tards. You flipped Batarel into the steel in Beth­le­hem, not me. You know how to fight the demons.”

“Pass,” Daniel said, and took a swig of his beer.

“Dammit, Daniel, we can’t take no for an answer!”

“That’s what you’re get­ting, Jack. I’m done with those fuckers.”

“What about your fam­ily? Don’t you want revenge?”

“Hell yes, I want revenge. But I’m also smart enough to know I won’t get it. Batarel was a fluke, Jack. You can’t kill these things. Not consistently.”

“I refuse to believe that.”

“You can refuse to believe a lot of things. They’ll still kill you.”

“Then at least I’ll die fight­ing for some­thing I do believe in. And I believe in free­dom. Until the demons are gone, the human race won’t be free.”

“We never were, Jack. You were okay with it when you didn’t know.”

“Dammit, I know now! I can’t let this go!”

Daniel smiled. “How does it feel? Now you know why I ran, why I didn’t just pipe down in that police sta­tion, admit to what they said I did.”

“Fuck you, Daniel. Maybe you aren’t who I thought you were. Enjoy being your angel of death.”

Jack stood up and walked to the door.

“Wait,” Daniel said.

Was that it? Was it that sim­ple? Was destroy­ing the demons why he was here? [insert some­thing ear­lier in the book with Daniel’s mom about God’s pur­pose]. Maybe his mother had been right. Maybe every­one did have a des­tiny. And maybe this was his.

“What,” Jack said. It wasn’t really a question.

Daniel stood up. “I’m in.”

29: Rev­e­la­tion

The Iraqi Air 737 touched down at Frank­furt Inter­na­tional a lit­tle after 3 AM local time. Daniel, Jack and Susan grabbed what lit­tle they had and trudged down the cen­tral aisle. Daniel had the scroll and hel­met in a carry-​​on gym bag, and for­tu­nately air­port secu­rity at Bagh­dad had been will­ing to accept a thou­sand dol­lars US to pre­tend they’d never seen the arti­facts leave their coun­try. Things in that coun­try were get­ting bet­ter, but not very much. Cor­rup­tion was still the rule of the day.

None of them had slept on the trip up, even though they were all beyond exhausted. They also hadn’t talked, even though they had adjoin­ing seats. Any time one of them seemed to start, it was all too obvi­ous that the most vocif­er­ous mem­ber of their team wasn’t with them. Daniel felt like he couldn’t even look Susan or Jack in the eye. But they had to go on, or Jeff’s sac­ri­fice would be mean­ing­less. They owed him that, to see this through.

As soon as Daniel stepped off the jet­way, he saw a famil­iar face. The blond hair and high, Nordic cheek­bones weren’t out of place here in Ger­many, nor was the expen­sive designer suit. But there was some­thing about the way Uriel car­ried him­self that set him apart any­way. He was still an archangel, even if he was wear­ing Armani.

Next to Uriel stood a dumpy guy with a scruffy beard and a “Frodo Lives” T-​​shirt. Daniel didn’t rec­og­nize him, but the guy was wav­ing at them.

“Dante,” Jack said from behind Daniel, sound­ing both puz­zled and relieved. “What the hell are you doing out here, kid?”

“Long story, sir,” Dante said. Uriel was lean­ing against a col­umn in the ter­mi­nal and still hadn’t moved or said a word. Daniel sup­posed he didn’t have to, he’d brought a human to do that for him.

“A story that has some­thing to do with our friend, here, I guess,” Jack said, motion­ing to Uriel.

“Your friend,” Uriel said, “the good Mis­ter Hicks, fell in with the wrong sort of peo­ple in Wash­ing­ton,” Uriel said.

“The kind of peo­ple who aren’t peo­ple?” Jack asked.

“Some­thing like that,” Uriel said. “I thought, given all the ser­vice he’s pro­vided to this endeavor, that I should keep an eye on him.”

The angel turned to address Daniel. “You have the arti­facts, Mis­ter Cho?”

Well, just get right down to it, Daniel thought. No how are you, or hey, what hap­pened to the old guy that was with you. “Right here,” he said, heft­ing the gym bag.

“Unortho­dox method of trans­port­ing such trea­sures, but any port in a storm, I sup­pose,” Uriel said. “And I trust you’ve seen their… capacity?”

“Yes,” Daniel said. They’d given the scroll a quick once over on the way to the air­port, where Sandy had dropped them off. Given that it was writ­ten in a lan­guage none of them could read, there wasn’t much to do with it. And putting on the hel­met again would have drawn too much atten­tion. Once they got out of the tun­nel sev­eral blocks away from the mosque, Sandy radioed for help and com­man­deered a Humvee to get them the hell out of Najaf as quickly as possible.

“Very well, then,” Uriel said. “Fol­low me.”

He strode away, and Daniel turned to look at Susan, give her a “can you believe this guy” look, but she was doing exactly as she was told, unques­tion­ingly obe­di­ent. Daniel sighed and followed.

Uriel took them to a limo wait­ing out­side, then to a hotel near the air­port. They checked in under assumed names and took the ele­va­tor up to the pent­house suites, which the archangel had reserved for them. Daniel tossed the gym bag on the bed and headed for the shower. He had about a thou­sand years of dust and blood to wash off.

#

Daniel stepped out of the bath­room, tow­el­ing off his hair and wear­ing the new clothes that had been left for him. He felt more human, but he was still exhausted, an—

Susan was cry­ing. She was sit­ting one of the couches, bawl­ing her head off. The rest of them, except Uriel, looked suck­er­punched. Daniel felt the same. He still couldn’t believe Jeff—

“Oh, Daniel!” Susan said as she saw him, ran up and crushed him in a hug. “I’m so sorry!”

Sorry? He gen­tly dis­en­tan­gled him­self. “Is this about Jeff?” he asked.

That just set off another round of cry­ing, and Susan retreated to the couch. Uriel started to say some­thing, but Jack waved him off.

“Daniel,” Jack said, “you bet­ter sit down.”

Daniel took a seat in the suite’s expan­sive liv­ing room. “What’s going on, Jack?”

“We got some bad news while you were in the shower. When Susan logged on to try to upload her video, we found out that the demons have hacked the website.”

“So this is about hack­ing?” Daniel was miss­ing some­thing here.

“No, Daniel.” Jack took a seat across from him. “They posted some videos of their own. We should have sus­pected this after they tried to kill Dante, it’s my fault we didn’t — “

“The attack on Mis­ter Hicks was well after the events — “ Uriel said, but Jack cut him off again.

“Daniel, they posted video of how they tor­tured and killed Susan’s edi­tor…” Jack trailed off, but Daniel could see he wasn’t done. “And your fam­ily. Your par­ents and sis­ters are dead. I’m sorry.”

Daniel felt like all the air dis­ap­peared out of the room. He couldn’t breathe. Every­thing was start­ing to go gray. It couldn’t be true, could it?

“I don’t rec­om­mend watch­ing the video,” Jack said. “It’s pretty graphic. But we’ve ver­i­fied that it’s real. They’re gone.”

“Gone.” The word tasted like ash.

“When they couldn’t find us, they went after any­one close to us,” Jack said. Susan and I don’t have liv­ing par­ents any­more, and I never got mar­ried. And you know what hap­pened to Jeff’s wife and why he didn’t have any kids. Susan’s edi­tor and your folks were all they could find.

“We’re going to get them, Daniel. You have my promise on that.”

“How?” Daniel said.

“Well, we’re going to finish — “

“We’re post­ing a video on the inter­net?” Daniel said. “That’s how we’re going to ‘get’ them? We’re going to take them down with fuck­ing YouTube?”

“It’s a start,” Jack said.

“It’s a fuck­ing joke!” Daniel said. “They’re d — dead, and it’s my fault. It’s my fault again. It’s my fault they’re dead…”

“Daniel, you know that’s not true,” Susan said.

“It is true!” Daniel said. “I couldn’t fuck­ing let it go, and now they’re dead. My m — mom, dad, Leah and Mary, it’s all my fault.” He got up and stormed out of the room.

#

“Let him go,” Jack said. Susan couldn’t believe it.

“Let him go?” she said. “What if — “

“He won’t leave the build­ing,” Uriel said. “I have secu­rity in place. And you, Miss Richard­son, have a job to do.”

Susan nod­ded, and turned back to her lap­top. “How am I sup­posed to post the final install­ment if I can’t log in?” she asked. They’d already dis­cov­ered that not only had the demons killed Stan, but they’d also taken down the New Amer­i­can Cen­tury website.

“I might be able to do some­thing about that,” Dante said. He opened his own lap­top, signed into the hotel wifi and set to work.

For the next few hours, Susan poured every­thing she’d been through along with every­thing she knew about writ­ing into telling the tale of what they’d uncov­ered in Iraq. She gave Jeff the hero’s treat­ment he deserved, and metic­u­lously laid out the case for the exis­tence of the immor­tals. Once they were home and save, she’d turn over the scroll and the hel­met to aca­d­e­mics who could ver­ify their authen­tic­ity, but she wanted the story to stand on its own. And she thought it did.

“Okay,” Dante finally said. “I wasn’t able to regain con­trol of the site, but I did the next best thing. I copied the site lay­out from a cached copy and built a new blog that looks just like it. I won’t have the archives, but it’s the same thing oth­er­wise. Then I hacked the DNS to redi­rect newamericancentury.com from the old IP address to our new IP address. I’ve got you set up on the new blog, Susan, so give it a try.”

Susan wasn’t sure she under­stood all of what Dante just said, but she clicked the favorite to her blog upload panel any­way. To her sur­prise, it came up, and she was able to log in. As Dante said, there were no old posts, but she got to work any­way upload­ing the edited video and her story.

An hour later, it was done. The story was out.

#

The next morn­ing a 767 landed at Rea­gan National Air­port from Frank­furt. The first peo­ple off the jet­way were Uriel, Jack, Dante, Susan and Daniel, fol­lowed by the rest of the first class pas­sen­gers. Jack flashed his FBI badge to get them all past Cus­toms, and they moved unac­costed out to a wait­ing limousine.

“This feels weird,” Daniel said. He was still stunned by the deaths of his fam­ily, but it had set­tled into more of a dull ache over the last twenty four hours. He’d passed a stress thresh­old, and just couldn’t feel much of any­thing any­more. But that didn’t stop the ratio­nal, log­i­cal side of his brain from ask­ing questions.

“I know,” Susan said. “I still feel like a fugitive.”

“Totally unnec­es­sary,” Uriel said as they piled into the limo. “You are under my pro­tec­tion. All charges against you have been dropped, and the gov­ern­ment is even set­tling all the prop­erty dam­age claims out of court to keep things quiet.”

Daniel wasn’t nearly as sur­prised as Susan was about the reac­tion thus far to her story. While it had been a run­away hit with the media, video being rebroad­cast on all the major cable net­works both in the US and around the world, the US gov­ern­ment had already declared it to be a hoax, insist­ing that there was no such thing as angels and demons, that it was all inter­net spe­cial effects. Daniel knew that was the only stance they really could take, if they wanted to pre­serve any author­ity at all, but Susan was crushed. She’d been hop­ing for real, last­ing change.

Daniel knew that the only times things changed, it was for the worse.

Before he knew it, the limo slowed to a stop in front of Daniel’s apart­ment. “You will find things cleaner than you left them,” Uriel said. “The demons ran­sacked your apart­ment when you left the coun­try, but I’ve had a clean­ing crew restore every­thing to normal.”

“Thanks,” Daniel said, reach­ing for the door.

“What are you going to do, Daniel?” Susan said.

“I’m going to try to get my old life back,” Daniel said, and stepped out of the limo.

28: The Bur­den of Proof

“How the hell are we sup­posed to get out of here?” Jeff said. Daniel didn’t know, and the hel­met wasn’t show­ing him any other secret doors, assum­ing it could do that. He couldn’t even read the ancient text on the display.

“Maybe we’re not sup­posed to get out,” Susan said.

“Look, missy, I know the sounds of com­bat when I hear it. And Mohammad’s lit­tle pea shooter and gonna do did­dley against mil­i­tary firepower.”

“I think we’re safer where we are.”

“Because an angel sent us here?” Jeff asked. Susan didn’t have to answer; they could see it in her face.

“Great day in the morn­ing,” Jeff said.

“Let’s not panic,” Daniel said, notic­ing how both Susan and Jeff jumped a bit at his ampli­fied voice. “Jack and Sandy are upstairs, I’m sure they have this under control.”

#

This is out of con­trol, Jack thought.

They were at the end of a long stone cor­ri­dor, just above an ancient stair­well. Every time they tried to enter the stair­well, some­one below shot at them. And it had to have been a demon, because it didn’t seem to care about the grenades they dropped past it. Two of Sandy’s men were also engaged in a rear hold­ing action against a band of — Jack wasn’t sure what they were, really. They were assist­ing the demons, but they were human. Sandy’s men had shot enough of them to ver­ify that. But they still had Jack pinned down with no way for­ward and no way back until rein­force­ments arrived to take care of the demonic sym­pa­thiz­ers. What a world.

“Well, Cap­tain Sandarski — “

“Sure,” Sandy said, “throw that back in my face now.”

“ — what do you, in your infi­nite tac­ti­cal wis­dom suggest?”

“Well, we could pour napalm down the stair­well,” Sandy suggested.

“A. You don’t have any napalm,” Jack said. “And B. Even it worked, it would either kill my friends down there or trap them behind a wall of fire we couldn’t get through.”

Sandy nod­ded. “Yeah, it’s not what you’d call a per­fect plan.”

“Any­thing useful?”

“Well, if you’re gonna tie my hands like that…”

“Right,” Jack said. “We need a decoy, some­thing for them to shoot at while we descend.”

Sandy looked back behind them. “Like, say, a dead body?”

Jack looked where his friend was look­ing, back towards the sym­pa­thiz­ers. “Yeah, that might work. Damn, son, all this time in the desert’s made you a cold-​​blooded son of a bitch.”

“I’ll take that as a com­pli­ment,” Sandy said. On his orders, his men forced the issue with the sym­pa­thiz­ers, push­ing them back as though the sol­diers were retreat­ing. The enemy resisted, but not much. Jack fig­ured they thought they were win­ning, that the sol­diers were going to leave their demon mas­ters alone. Once they got as far as the first body, Jack darted in and dragged it back to the stair­well. The sol­diers fell back, cov­er­ing him.

“Okay,” Jack said. “We only get one shot at this.”

“You don’t think they’re dumb enough to fall for it twice?” Sandy asked.

“Would you be?”

“Hey, I was dumb enough to join the Army, so I’m prob­a­bly not a good test case.”

“Exactly,” Jack said. “Okay, as soon as Habib here moves, we chase him. Let them shoot the body, and then we over­whelm the shoot­ers. You guys have zip ties, we can use those to dis­able them. Got it?”

“Have I told you,” Sandy said, “just how much I missed work­ing with you?”

“No, you didn’t.”

Sandy nod­ded. “There might just be a rea­son for that.”

“Go!” Jack shouted, and pushed the cadaver down the stairs, start­ing it off as ver­ti­cally as he could.

Jack and the sol­diers fol­lowed the body, scream­ing at the top of their lungs. As expected, the body was pinned to the wall by gun­fire, and as the lone demon guard­ing the stair­well stepped for­ward, Jack hit him with a fly­ing tackle that would have made his high school foot­ball coach beam with pride. He smashed the demon into the stone wall, and in sec­onds they had it face-​​down on the floor and hog-​​tied with zip ties. They also ripped a rag off the increas­ingly bloody cadaver and shoved in the demon’s mouth as a gag. Jack had to admit, Sandy’s men were well trained.

“Okay,” Jack said, absurdly qui­etly con­sid­er­ing the cacoph­ony of the gun­fire and strug­gle. “Any­body dead?”

All the sol­diers checked them­selves, and they con­firmed that they were not dead.

“Good,” Jack said. “Let’s keep it that way, shall we?” He grabbed the assault rifle from the floor, and reversed the taped together banana clips to ensure he had fresh rounds. He’d count them later, if they lived.

“Let’s move.”

#

Daniel was start­ing to worry about his air sup­ply. He didn’t know how long the bat­tery in the hel­met was going to hold out. But no mat­ter how hard he pulled on the sides of the thing, it wouldn’t budge.

“Here, let me take a look at that,” Susan said. “Jeff, hold the camera.”

“While we’re at it,” Jeff said, “why don’t we just put on a pup­pet show?”

Daniel saw Susan reach up and take hold of the hel­met. She yanked upwards. “Whoa whoa whoa whoa!” Daniel said. “You’re gonna take my head off!”

“No I’m not, you big baby. Pipe down.” She felt around on the hel­met, on top, around the back, down the front. When she ran her fin­gers just under the jaw­line, Daniel heard a faint pop, then felt the padding recede. The dis­play pan­els retracted and his hear­ing returned to normal.

Susan lifted the hel­met off his head, then held it in one hand while she straight­ened his hair. “There. Not so bad.”

He took the hel­met from her and looked into her eyes. “Thank you,” he said.

She was just inches away. “Any time,” she said.

“Ahem!” Jeff said. They both jumped, back­ing away from each other. “I’d sug­gest you kids get a room, but the prob­lem is, see, we have one. And we can’t get out of it.”

“Right,” Daniel said. “Well, let’s look around again. Maybe there’s another way out of here.”

Jeff handed the cam­era back to Susan. “I think I got some great footage of the stones in the ceil­ing, just now,” he said. “Just sayin’.”

#

Jack crept through the dark cor­ri­dors under­neath the mosque. The place was a labyrinth, and he had no idea where this Mul­lah Moham­mad had taken Daniel, Jeff and Susan. He knew they were down here, and he knew demons were down here. It would be bad enough if he was play­ing hide and seek with enemy troops, try­ing to find Daniel before they did. But given that if he found the demons first he couldn’t kill them while they could pretty eas­ily kill him…

“You hear some­thing, LT?” Sandy whis­pered behind him.

“No. Why?”

“You’re slow­ing down.”

“Sorry.” Jack picked up the pace again, creep­ing towards the next inter­sec­tion in the stone cor­ri­dors. It was just about pitch black down here, and they’d avoid­ing using the sol­diers’ lights so as not to give away their posi­tion. They were lit­er­ally blind. He ran his hand along the wall, try­ing to move as qui­etly as pos­si­ble and fil­ter out the minis­cule sounds of the sol­diers clos­ing ranks behind him from what could be demons in front of him. He was also on the look­out for any light sources that—

His hand reached the end of the wall and touched warm flesh.

Jack snapped his hand back and whipped his rifle around, hit­ting the light he held along­side it.

“Turn that off, you fool!” a robed cleric hissed in thickly accented Eng­lish. Jack killed the light. The man seemed to have come from a side tun­nel that branched back the way they had come. Given the half a sec­ond Jack had been able to see it, anyway.

“Who are you?” the man whispered.

“Jack Har­ris,” Jack said. “I’m look­ing for — “

“Daniel Cho, yes, I know. I’m actu­ally look­ing for you. The archangel said you’d be with them. Quickly, fol­low me.”

“Sir, I can’t see you.”

Jack felt the cleric’s hand grab his, and guide it to flow­ing fab­ric. “Grab my robe. Quickly, now!”

“Yes,” another voice said. “Quickly. We’re all very eager to meet your guests.”

Lights snapped on and Jack was momen­tar­ily blinded. As his vision cleared, he saw three demons in Bedouin robes, all hold­ing AK-​​47s on them. Before he could say any­thing, Sandy opened fire on all three, straf­ing them with him M-​​16. The demons returned fire, and Jack dove for the mul­lah, hear­ing the man cry out as Jack drove him to the floor.

“Go, Jack!” Sandy said, and con­tin­ued fir­ing on the demons. He couldn’t kill them, but the bar­rage of lead kept them from advancing.

Jack scooped up the mul­lah and ran the way the man had come. The mullah’s voice was ragged, and Jack was pretty sure the guy had been hit, but they had no time to stop and check. He could hear Sandy and his men cov­er­ing their retreat, falling back behind them. As the mul­lah directed him first one way, then another, Jack quickly lost track of where he was, the sound of Sandy and his men buy­ing them time grew more indis­tinct. This bet­ter be worth it, Jack thought.

Finally the man stopped Jack by a door, and fum­bled for a key. Jack took the key, slick with the mullah’s blood, and fit­ted into the door. It swung open on a dimly lit room con­tain­ing his friends.

“Get inside,” the mul­lah said. “Now!”

Jack heard foot­steps clos­ing on their posi­tion and swing his light and rifle up, but it was only Sandy. He was bloody and limp­ing from what looked like a hit to the thigh.

“They’re right behind me,” Sandy shouted. “Go!”

Jack bolted into the room, push­ing the mul­lah in front of him, Sandy right on his heels. He turned and helped Sandy move the heavy door.

“Don’t close that!” Jeff said. “It — “

The door slammed with a hol­low thud, and Jack almost imme­di­ately heard pound­ing on the other side.

“can’t be opened from this side,” Jeff said.

“As long as they can’t open it from that side for a while,” Jack said, “I’ll take that.” He turned to Sandy. “Your men?”

Sandy shook his head. It was all they needed to say.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Looks like we have a few minu — “

Susan screamed.

Jack looked over and saw that the mul­lah had slid to the floor, leav­ing a wide, wet streak of blood on the wall behind him. He was hit bad, much worse than Jack thought.

Daniel was already kneel­ing down next to him, try­ing to stop the bleed­ing. His hands moved with steady assur­ance and expe­ri­ence, the prac­ticed motions of a trauma sur­geon. But Jack had seen enough bat­tle­field casu­al­ties to know it was already too late.

“Behind — “ the mul­lah said.

“Save your strength,” Daniel said. “Don’t talk.”

The mul­lah grabbed Daniel by the shirt. “Behind the altars,” he said. “The vision of — “ he coughed, blood spat­ter­ing from his lips, “of angels will point your — “

The man slumped over. He was dead.

“The vision of angels?” Jack said. “What the hell does that mean?”

Daniel ran across the small room and grabbed an ancient hel­met off one of two small altars set off in an alcove. “This,” he said. He put the hel­met on and Jack saw the eye holes close off, replaced by two flat black con­vex lenses.

“Holy shit, what is — “

“Quiet,” Jeff said. “Danny, go look behind the altar.”

Daniel walked over to the alcove and began exam­in­ing the walls behind the altar. “I see it,” he said. His voice was loud and deeper than usual, almost boom­ing. “The read­out in the hel­met is show­ing me a hid­den door, super­im­pos­ing it. If you didn’t know it was there, you’d never find it.”

Daniel pushed in on the stones and a small sec­tion behind the altar moved away, maybe two by three feet. It wasn’t much of an escape hatch. “There’s a tun­nel here,” Daniel said.

“Daniel,” Susan said. “It’s pitch black. I can’t see a thing.”

“I can,” Daniel said. “Clear as day as far as the helmet’s concerned.”

“Okay,” Jack said. “Daniel goes first, since he can see what’s going on. Then Susan, then Jeff.”

“No,” Jeff said.

Jack turned to the old man. “What do you mean, no?”

[In the sec­ond draft, have this hap­pen after they find they can’t shut the door behind them]

Jeff took the AK-​​47 away from Jack. “Get a move on,” he said. “I’ll hold them back as long as I can. I remem­ber a thing or two about fir­ing from cover.”

Daniel took the old man by the shoul­ders. “Jeff, you don’t have to do this.” The soft words sounded odd with the helmet’s boom­ing amplification.

“Yeah, I do, Danny. You have to get this story out. It can’t be lim­ited to con­spir­acy nuts like me. You have to make peo­ple believe. You can do it. I know you can.”

The door cracked, and Jack could tell the demons were break­ing through. Jeff started shoo­ing peo­ple into the tun­nel. “Go on, get mov­ing! I’m gonna hole up behind these altars and buy you all the time I can. But it won’t mat­ter much if you don’t get the hell out of here!”

Jack watched as Daniel, then Susan, then Sandy climbed into the tun­nel. He clapped Jeff on the shoul­der. “Thank you.”

“Just look after him, okay?” Jeff said.

Jack nod­ded and scut­tled into the tun­nel. He’d gone maybe ten meters when he heard Jeff open fire.

27: Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

Daniel looked into the alcove. It held two small altars, each carved from a sin­gle block of black stone. On one altar was a scroll cas­ing. On the other was a bronze hel­met. Both looked very, very old.

“The scroll,” Moham­mad said, “tells the story of the great war of the angels, the fall of Lucifer and how the angels and demons came to walk among us. It is writ­ten in ancient Baby­lon­ian, and accord­ing to myth is only a trans­la­tion of a far older work handed down in clay tablets, which itself was tran­scribed from oral tra­di­tions. No one knows how old the story really is.”

“And the hel­met?” Daniel asked.

“It is one of the few remain­ing angelic arti­facts. It is the hel­met of an angel killed in the great war.”

Daniel was trans­fixed by the hel­met. It looked bronze only at first. The more he looked at it, the more trou­ble he had in deter­min­ing what metal it was actu­ally made of. The color was a dark gray-​​green, mot­tled with age. “May I exam­ine it?”

“They are both yours now, Daniel Cho. By order of the archangel.”

Daniel picked up the hel­met. It was heav­ier than he expected. He looked inside, and imme­di­ately saw why. Not only were the walls of the hel­met thicker than usual, but the hel­met was padded with some kind of poly­mer. As he turned it in the light, he saw… No, that was impossible.

“Susan, bring your cam­era over here. Does that thing have zoom?”

“Sure.” She aimed where he directed.

“Zoom in on that. What do you see?”

“It looks like a cir­cuit board,” she said. “Like the moth­er­board on my laptop.”

Micro­cir­cuitry, Daniel thought. In an ancient angelic hel­met. How much had Uriel not told them?

“Okay,” he said, “stand back.”

“Whoa, there, sport,” Jeff said. “What do you have in mind? You’ve got that look on your face.”

[make sure we hear the story of Jeff’s wife and his search for her mur­derer ear­lier in the story, so it informs Daniel’s sense of vengeance later]

“I’m just going to try it on,” Daniel said. “It’s a cou­ple dozen cen­turies old, right? My lap­top bat­tery doesn’t last four hours.”

“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Danny.”

“Jeff, we need to know every­thing we can about these things, right? And besides, would Uriel have sent us after this if it was dangerous?”

“Prob­a­bly no worse,” Jeff said, “than the Holy Grail, the golden fleece, Prometheus’s fire…”

Daniel looked at Susan. “You get­ting this?” She nod­ded, keep­ing the cam­era on him.

“Okay,” he said. He looked down at the hel­met again, raised it up and put it on his head.

As soon as it was steady, he heard a soft “thwup” sound and felt some­thing soft close around his throat. The sounds of the room faded instantly to noth­ing, only to come back up slightly dif­fer­ent, like they were being run through a dig­i­tal fil­ter. The eye holes went black, and then faded back to trans­parency. Super­im­posed over his field of vision, Daniel could see var­i­ous read­outs float­ing in the air around him. The char­ac­ters were for­eign to him, but they look old, like the Sumer­ian or Baby­lon­ian writ­ing he’d seen in muse­ums. Despite the seal around his neck, he found he could breathe nor­mally, although the dusty smell of the room was com­pletely gone. The air was clean and cooler than the room air on his body.

“Daniel?” Susan said. Her eyes were huge.

“What do you see?” he asked.

She jumped at the sound of his voice. “The — the eye holes are black and have a matte fin­ish, like you have black stones in there. You can see?”

“I can see fine,” he said. He decided not to try to explain the heads up dis­play yet. “What else?”

“Your voice is loud, like a bull­horn. It’s been processed, too, sounds deeper than normal.”

Daniel chuck­led. “The voice of God,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Susan said, “but that’s the effect.”

Daniel turned his head and looked at Jeff. He saw that the Mul­lah behind Jeff was pray­ing to him­self. “Well,” he said, “they clearly have bet­ter bat­tery tech­nol­ogy than Dell.”

“You’re a riot, Danny. Now take that blasted thing off.”

Daniel reached up and put his palm to either side of the hel­met and tried to lift it off. It didn’t budge so much as a mil­lime­ter. “Uh oh,” he said.

“It doesn’t come off?” Susan said. “How are you going to eat?”

For that mat­ter, Daniel thought, what hap­pens if the power gives out and the air fil­tra­tion stops work­ing? He was about to sug­gest she give it a shot when they heard a loud bang from above. Dust rained down from between the stones in the ceiling.

The mul­lah reached into his robes and pulled out a pis­tol. “You will wait here,” he said, and stepped out the door, clos­ing it behind him. Jeff ran up to the door and tried the knob.

“It’s locked,” he said.

#

Dante Hicks shut down his PC and pre­pared to leave the office. It was early after­noon, but there was no one around to miss him. The rest of the office had either already left early to get a head start on the week­end, or they were already on vaca­tion. June was quiet month in fed­eral ser­vice, or at least it was sup­posed to be.

He slung his lap­top bag over his shoul­der and walked past the ele­va­tor to the stair­well. He’d been try­ing to get in shape for a while, and given the recent events with Agent Har­ris he fig­ured now was as good a time as any. Some pretty weird shit was going on, and he wanted to be ready for it.

Actu­ally, Dante had been dream­ing about some­thing like this for… well, pretty much his whole life. He always thought his life would be cool, like the stuff he grew up watch­ing on TV. But when he grad­u­ated from MIT and thumbed his nose at sev­eral cor­po­rate job offers to get a job with the FBI, he found it couldn’t be more unlike the X-​​Files. Hell, it wasn’t even as excit­ing as Bar­ney Miller. At least until this week.

Now, he was at ground zero of some­thing big. Some­thing he didn’t have to embell­ish over beers with Ran­dall. In fact, he hadn’t even told Ran­dall about the nanites. Those were the weird­est of the weird, and he wanted to puz­zle it out him­self a lit­tle more.

As he walked down the stair­well to the bio­labs, he thought he heard a weird echo of his foot­steps. It stopped when he stopped, so he wasn’t being fol­lowed, but it sounded… different.

I’m prob­a­bly just para­noid, he thought. All this stuff is get­ting to me.

He exited the stair­well and rounded the cor­ner to the labs. He badged in and saw that Shel­don, the lab tech he’d given the blood sam­ple to, was the only one on duty here as well. Noth­ing cleared out like DC on a beau­ti­ful sum­mer day, he thought.

“Mis­ter Cooper!” Dante said. “How’s it hanging?”

“The answer will require fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion to ver­ify repeat­able results,” Shel­don said. Dante felt a wave of depres­sion. Not only did he get the joke, he rec­og­nized that it was a joke. He needed to hang out with non-​​geeks more often.

“Are you like­wise seek­ing to escape the sink­ing ves­sel?” Shel­don asked.

“Uh…”

“I refer to our roden­tine cowork­ers, and their efforts to leave the build­ing as though it were a ship at sea tak­ing on water.”

“Gotcha. Actu­ally, I’m on my way out. I was won­der­ing if you’d dis­cov­ered any more about that blood sample.”

“You mean apart from the fact that it con­tains nan­otech­nol­ogy far in advance of any­thing com­mer­cially repro­ducible today? Or per­haps apart from how each nanite appears to derive power from no dis­cern­able source. I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to look into the mat­ter, as I’ve got sev­eral dozen algae blooms to cultivate.”

Damn, Dante thought. “Really?”

“Of course not, you fool. I was employ­ing sar­casm. I’ve been spend­ing every wak­ing moment in a thus far futile attempt to dis­cern the work­ings of the nanites. I swear, you Comp­Sci types can’t take a joke.”

“That’s, uh, great, Shel­don, but what else have you found?”

Shel­don walked around a lab table, motion­ing for Dante to fol­low him. Dante was again struck by how the bio­chemist moved with short, pre­cise motions, like a bird. “I put the blood into a growth cul­ture,” Shel­don said. “Tried to grow it like any other cel­lu­lar material.”

“And?”

“It reacted accord­ingly to the growth matrix,” Shel­don said. “But as the red blood cells increased in num­ber, so did the num­ber of nanites.”

“Really?” Dante asked. “Where did they come from?”

“The luminif­er­ous ether, Dante,” Shel­don said, sound­ing annoyed.

“What’s a luminescent — “

“The either,” Shel­don said, “the back­ground medium in which New­ton thought all mat­ter existed. It was another sar­cas­tic remark. I can see I’m going to have to dumb things down a lit­tle with you. Engi­neers.” He har­rumphed and con­tin­ued. “The nanites are capa­ble of repro­duc­ing on their own. It’s impos­si­ble to tell exactly how with­out greatly increased mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, but it’s clear that they are capa­ble of draw­ing car­bon atoms out of their envi­ron­ment and build­ing new ver­sions of them­selves, estab­lish­ing an effec­tively unlim­ited supply.”

“So if you had these in your blood…” Dante said.

“You would not only be effec­tively immor­tal, but the mech­a­nism by which you became immor­tal would be in and of itself inex­haustible. You’d live for­ever. Or at least until the sun goes red giant, at which point — “

“And you said the nanites had no effect in other blood samples?”

“None at all. I don’t know how such sim­ple machines could store such pro­gram­ming, much less process and exe­cute it, but they have no reac­tion to cells that don’t con­tain the DNA of the orig­i­nal sam­ple. Ponce De Leon would have found this dis­cov­ery intensely frustrating.”

“The means to eter­nal life, but it’s not trans­ferrable,” Dante said.

“Pre­cisely.”

Behind them, Dante heard a sin­gle pair of hands clapping.

He turned around and saw two men in expen­sive suits stand­ing at the entry to the lab. He hadn’t heard them badge in. One of them was clap­ping, slowly. The other was clos­ing the blinds over the one win­dow into the lab.

“Who are you peo­ple?” Shel­don demanded. Dante knew the tech didn’t appre­ci­ate peo­ple intrud­ing on his territory.

“I would think,” the clap­ping man said as he stepped for­ward and stopped the applause, “that you’d be happy to see us.” The man’s accent was faint, and Dante couldn’t tell if it was British or Australian.

“And why would I be happy to have you intrude on my lab?”

“You are study­ing the blood of immor­tals,” the man said. The other man qui­etly moved to the other end of the lab, and Dante noticed that just like that, he and Shel­don were pinned in. No way to get past the men other than going through heavy lab equipment.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said before Shel­don could reply. “You must have us con­fused with some­one else. I was just ask­ing my friend here about some gun­shot residue.”

“No you weren’t,” Shel­don said. “I would never stood to run­ning GSR tests.”

“Shut up, Shel­don,” Dante said, as qui­etly as he could.

“Get out of my lab!” Shel­don said. “Do not make me call security!”

The man smiled. “You won’t call secu­rity on us. For one thing, that would imply that the secu­rity guards were still alive.”

The other man, the one that hadn’t spo­ken, pulled some­thing out of his suit jacket. It was a small dig­i­tal cam­era. Dante thought it was prob­a­bly sim­i­lar to the ones Richard­son had used to record her videos. He started film­ing them, being sure to get him, Dante and the other demon in the shot.

Demon. Dante knew what they were now. He could see it in the way they moved, a grace­ful econ­omy of motion borne of cen­turies of prac­tice. The one who had spo­ken reached out, took a grad­u­ated cylin­der and smashed the end of it against the lab table.

“That is expen­sive lab­o­ra­tory equip­ment!” Shel­don said. “I’m going to see that you pay for that!” The poor guy still had no idea what was really going on.

The end of the cylin­der was now a jagged point, a more expen­sive but no less lethal ver­sion of a bro­ken beer bot­tle. The demon held it out in front him.

“Please,” he said, “resist. It will make this take longer.”

#

Jack jumped through the hole in the side of the mosque blown open by the demons. He had a flamethrower from the Humvee, and a ban­dolier full of grenades. He knew nei­ther would do much against the demons long term, but he should be able to do enough dam­age to slow them down. Hope­fully enough to extract Daniel, Jeff and Susan and get the fuck out of there.

Sandy and his men jumped through behind him, sim­i­larly armed. Sandy had an RPG that might pack enough punch to kill one of the bas­tards, though Jack wasn’t sure. Batarel had a grenade shoved down his pants and was on their asses the next day.

The inte­rior of the mosque was a study in high end destruc­tion. The demo­li­tion guys knew their busi­ness, and Jack sup­posed that fit. They’d prob­a­bly been prac­tic­ing since the inven­tion of black pow­der. The upside was that they left a pretty clear trail behind them. The hole in the wall opened into a smaller tem­ple, and with another explo­sion on the other side into the main hall. Jack saw bread­crumbs made of dust, shards of mar­ble, and ash lead­ing down a side cor­ri­dor. He sup­posed when you were immor­tal, you didn’t have to wait for the blast to clear.

“Come on!” he shouted to Sandy and his men, and ran down the cor­ri­dor after the demons.

#

Dante grabbed a Bun­sen burner, turned it on, and threw it at the demon. It caught on the feed tube and fell to the floor less than half way to him.

“Impres­sive,” the demon said. Great, Dante thought. Not only is he going to kill me, he’s going to stop to make fun of me first. Why don’t we just go back to high school gym class and get it over with?

“There’s, uh, more where that came from,” Dante said.

“I’m sure there is,” the demon said.

“Why are you doing this?” Shel­don screamed. Poor guy was still look­ing for logic.

“We’re clean­ing up a mess,” the other demon said, behind Dante and Shel­don. “Batarel was an idiot, and let this get out of hand. So it falls to us to clean up the loose ends.”

“I won’t tell any­one!” Shel­don said.

“You already have,” the sec­ond demon said. “Which is why you have to die.”

Shel­don started to sob, but Dante wasn’t fin­ished. He went over every­thing he knew about these guys in his head. They were just as human as he was, apart from the nan­otech­nol­ogy that kept them eter­nally healthy. They bled. They could be killed, if he could do enough damage.

He broke out his best William Shat­ner impres­sion, com­plete with hand ges­tures. “Look,” he said as he sur­rep­ti­tiously pulled of the rub­ber hose from the gas noz­zle the Bun­sen burner was attached to, “there has to be,” wav­ing his other hand like a mad star­ship cap­tain, “a way,” grab­bing the igniter with his other hand, “we can make a deal.”

“That’s the worst Cap­tain Kirk I’ve ever seen,” Shel­don said.

The demon stepped for­ward again, forc­ing Dante to retreat, then calmly reached over and turned off the gas. “Your kind is trou­ble, Mis­ter Hicks. You’re too clever for your own good. Curios­ity killed the cat.”

“Actu­ally,” Dante said, “I’m pretty lazy. You know, the early bird may get the worm, but the sec­ond mouse gets the cheese.” He was bab­bling now, say­ing any­thing he could to stall them. Give him time to think of something.

“I think we’re done with the chit chat,” the demon said. “It’s time to end this.” The demon took another step for­ward, and his head exploded with a sharp crack.

“Agh!” Shel­don screamed behind Dante. “Another one!”

Dante turned and saw a blond man stand­ing at the door to the lab with a hunt­ing rifle. He looked vaguely familiar.

The remain­ing demon actu­ally hissed at the new­comer. “Back off, Uriel! This is none of your concern!”

Uriel? The angel Jack had talked to? He’d seen him, briefly, on one of Richardson’s videos. Dante looked down and saw the first demon’s head reassem­bling itself. Damn, that’s unnerv­ing, he thought.

“Step away from the humans, Zagiel,” Uriel said, walk­ing into the room and keep­ing the rifle trained on the stand­ing demon. “They are under my protection.”

The demon, Zagiel, stepped away from them, towards Uriel. “You should not inter­fere in our deal­ings, angel.”

Uriel smiled. “The rules are chang­ing, Zagiel. I would think demons above all would embrace change.” He fired, and the bul­let struck Zagiel in the chest, knock­ing him back.

“Come on,” Uriel said to Dante and Shel­don. “We need to get you some­where safe.”

“Safe?” Shel­don screamed. “We’re in the Hoover Building!”

“Yeah,” Dante said, hop­ping over a table towards the angel. “And so are they.”

He looked back to see Zagiel pulling him­self back to his feet, and the other demon also try­ing to stand, head mostly recon­structed and hair grow­ing back out at a vis­i­ble speed. Spooky.

“Oh, very well,” Shel­don said, and scram­bled to fol­low them.

“Get behind me,” Uriel said, back­ing to the door­way. As Dante ran past, he saw the angel pull a grenade out of a pocket and pull the pin. Dante thought of all the gas pipes in that room. Aw, shit, he thought.

As soon as he and Shel­don were in the hall­way, he tack­led the bio­chemist to the ground.

“What the deuce?” Shel­don had time to say before Dante felt the angel fall on top of them and the room went up.