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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

[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.

“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.”

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.

“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.

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.