Avenging Angels (The Seraphim Chronicles Book 1) (27 page)

Graham decided to redirect the conversation, as he did most times his mother called. “What anniversary, mother? It’s nowhere near my annual job evaluation, and we all know I never got married.”

Graham knew bringing up marriage would put his mother on the defensive. No one in the family wanted to talk about his fiancé ending their engagement after his accident and full-body tissue replacement.

His mother’s eyes flitted away from the camera for a moment before she collected herself. “It’s the anniversary of your return to Earth. You know, from the mission that secured your meteoric rise in the Citadel. Oh, your father and grandparents would be so pleased.”

Graham could not prevent himself from rolling his eyes. He had always detested at his mother’s flair for the dramatic.

“Very well, mother,” Graham replied, doing his best to remain cordial. “Thank you for remembering. Good night.” He closed the call before his mother had the chance to say anything else.

Graham stood by the terminal, still dripping water onto the floor. His romantic mood all but deflated by the unexpected and unwelcome reminder of his mother’s attitude toward the Angels. He hated how she saw them as second-class citizens, a mere labor class.

Graham turned and his eyes caught the vision of Celeste, standing under the waterfall and his heart reignited into the slow simmer from before. She had her head tilted up toward the head of the fountain. In slow motion, she swayed back and forth, underneath the falling deluge, with her eyes closed. She seemed oblivious to everything else around her, captured in the sensation of the water rushing down her body.

With his heart pounding in his chest, he walked over to the waterfall, never letting his gaze fall from her exquisite beauty. An itch, subtle at first, drew involuntary nails to relieve the sensation. With each step, the tingling across his skin intensified, but he longed for Celeste more than he longed for relief.

He stepped into the waterfall with her, putting his arms around her waist and pressing his lips against her mouth. Celeste let out another soft moan as his tongue parted her lips. The fire in his heart, matched only be the fire across his skin, was unquenchable. Celeste reached up and ran her fingers through his hair as the water poured down on them. Graham felt her nails dig into his scalp, forcing him to reach up and pull her hands away.

“Not so hard, Celeste,” he growled, attempting to keep a romantic tone in his words. That was when he looked down and saw the blood stained patch of hair stuck underneath her fingernails. Graham stepped back out of the waterfall, followed by a smiling Celeste.

“Silas, what’s the matter?” she asked with all the innocence of child. “Have I done something to displease you?”

Graham stared at his beautiful assistant with horror. He could not understand how she could be so calm after she tore into his scalp. Wet flames began to lick at his shoulders and arms, causing Graham to lose all previous interest in romance. He scratched at his flesh with manic fury, willing the flames to quench under his digging nails.

“I think I need to go to the hospital,” he said, worry etching itself across his face. “Go get me a towel, please.”

Celeste smiled and walked around Graham’s twitching form. His nails raked across his body as he tried using the soles of his feet to relieve the fire dancing on his legs. She retrieved a towel from the chaise lounge next to the railing and walked back to the pool’s edge. A puddle of water gathered at her feet, but she held up the towel and signaled that she was ready to dry him off first.

He stood before her, grabbing her arms and kissing her again on the mouth in a vain attempt to take his mind off the discomfort. She smiled as she wrapped the towel around him and started drying off his shoulders. He raised his arms like a child and she worked her way down his body, wiping away the water from his torso and legs.

His smile faded as a flood of fire erupted across his body. Bright ruby spots blossomed across his neck and shoulders as he fought an undeniable compulsion to claw at his skin. Graham began screaming, raking at his flesh as he felt the bites of a million invisible fire ants eating at every surface of his body. He pulled away from Celeste in a manic dance, scouring at his flesh with his fingernails. She looked at him as if nothing was out of the ordinary. She did not seem to understand that he was in extreme pain.

“Ahh!” he screamed. “Celeste, what’s going on?” Within seconds, his entire body was fiery red. His scratching had opened up bloody gashes all over his arms and legs. Celeste stood there holding the blood-soaked towel, calm and unfazed at the gruesome display. Graham fell to the pool deck, moaning and writhing in agony. His hands shook as he fought his instinct to tear away at his own flesh.

“Celeste, call for help! NOW!”

She dropped the crimson-stained towel and walked to the console just outside the pool area, which activated as she approached. “Emergency services, please,” she said sweetly as water continued to drip from her hair and body. At the next prompt, she said her name, Graham’s address, and described his wounds.

Graham cringed as a fresh wave of agonizing pain crashed over him. Through all the unbearable stinging and itching, he resented how she could be so cool and collected. Had his suffering not been so intense, he would have made an enormous fuss over her not treating him the way he deserved. It was unfair she was not suffering alongside him. He almost opened his mouth to berate her insensitivity, but the maddening discomfort strangled the words in his throat. He would surely go insane if this torture did not cease.

An older man appeared on the console screen. Celeste spoke to the dispatcher with the same easy and pleasant smile she wore whenever she made a new acquaintance. 

Flailing around on the pool deck behind her, Graham screamed. The dispatcher’s eyes grew wide with horror. Celeste explained the situation with the same calmness as if she were ordering take-out. All the while Graham floundered, wrestling with his agony in a pool of his own blood.

The medics were dispatched and on their way to Graham’s residence. Celeste turned from the console and strolled back to his side. She picked up the bloody towel, resuming the task of drying off Graham’s trembling body. His screams filled the night sky as each sweep of the towel tugged at his ragged flesh, exposing the muscles and tendons of his arms and legs. Celeste dabbed the towel against his body, unaware of the small river of blood flowing into the pool, and washing bits of his flesh into the water.

FORTY-THREE

The Level Ten Crisis Clinic, situated in one of the upper habitat rings high of the Olympic citadel, reinforced the notion that divided the have’s from the have not’s. It was impossible to visit a patient if you were not a relative or superior, at least that would be the case if you walked in through the main doors. However, if anyone else was determined enough to get inside, there were ways to do just that. People entering via corridors and freight lifts, dressed as a maintenance worker, did not turn a single head. In general, Angels - or the few residents from the LTZ who could not get anything better - held those jobs. Once someone had access to the infrastructure, navigating the public areas became much simpler. A smile, a nod, and a little confidence could get you pretty much anywhere you needed to go.

Felicia was still fuming over Garrett’s callous decision to slip a dose of the disease to a stranger. This was not the first time he had pulled a stunt like this, inflicting the virus upon an innocent person. His penchant for creating chaos was sickening. He enjoyed some perverse kind of pleasure in watching the populace react to the strange symptoms.

No one understood his motives, not even Felicia. At one time, she and Garrett had been very close, but now she did not understand the man he had become. Garrett and his rogue motives were wrong. If he did not stop, their superiors would have to stop him by force. They could not afford for him to keep spreading the disease any faster than it had already. They were nowhere close to a cure. She thought about the first victims of the disease, and how they had suffered before the virus had mutated. “What happens if it mutates again?” she thought. She shook her head to clear her mind; she wanted to get into the clinic, finish what she set out to do, and get out without alerting anyone to her actions.

Felicia located the staff locker room in the crisis unit so she could change out of her maintenance uniform into a set of scrubs she had stolen from a pile of unwashed clothing in the laundry facility. She shook out the wrinkles from the used clothing before slipping into them. She had ditched her own clothes in the bottom of a garbage can in the receiving department.

If someone noticed his or her clean scrubs had gone missing from a locker, it might have raised suspicion. She decided to wear dirty scrubs so it would appear she had just finished a shift, or was heading to a locker to change into fresh clothes after handling an emergency.

She left the locker room and walked toward the nearest nurse’s station. The layout of the clinic was foreign to her but she did not have the time for proper surveillance. She pushed through the set of doors separating the public side of the clinic from the service corridors.

Bright light assaulted her eyes and she had to resist the urge to shade her eyes with her hand. It would have brought undue attention upon herself, and she needed to get to the pilot. There was no time to waste. She swiped a tablet and a doctor’s ID card from a nurse’s station as she walked by. She pretended to review a patient’s chart as she studied a floor plan of the clinic. There was only one thing that was going to help the pilot at this point. She needed to find the nearest pharmaceutical dispensary and determine the most direct path to the pilot’s quarantine suite.

Felicia set out to execute her agenda using the service corridors. The patient corridors were the riskier option; the chances of running into real medical staff or a security officer were too great. In the service corridors, she could bluff and say she was new and lost. Besides, if stealth and deceit failed, there would be fewer witnesses to render unconscious before stuffing their bodies in a closet to buy her some time.

The floor plan on her tablet told her she was nearing a dispensary. She used the stolen ID and obtained two doses of the required medication. The first dose was for the pilot, and the other was just in case. With the injectors in her pocket, she continued unimpeded through the service corridor to the quarantined room of Daryl Simmonds.

She reached the doors to the patient corridor and took a deep breath to steady herself for the next step. The public could not know about the disease or its history. The time for exposing the truth had not yet arrived.

She took a quick peek out of the sidelight and checked for anyone else in the hall. Her path was clear, but she would have to move fast. She walked through the doors and entered the patient room on the opposite side of the hall from Simmonds’ room. The woman lying in the bed appeared old and frail, but slumbering in a deep, peaceful sleep. Felicia needed a distraction to draw the staff away from her target and the old woman was going to have to do.

She walked over to the far side of the bed and pretended to be checking the monitoring equipment. She dared a quick glance over her shoulder to see if anyone was within eyesight. Felicia determined she was alone, so she retrieved the signal scrambler clipped to the back of her waistband. It was round, silver, and looked like an ordinary woman’s makeup mirror, but if anyone took a closer look, it would become apparent that it was not what it seemed. She twisted the two halves ninety degrees until she heard a metallic snap, and then tucked it under the woman’s pillow with a quick pass.

The woman stirred and rolled over onto her side, facing away from the door. Felicia held her breath and stared at the woman’s face. If she awoke and opened her eyes, Felicia could continue play-acting as a clinic nurse. However, there would be a witness to her presence in the clinic, and she needed to remain unseen.

The woman yawned in her sleep and nuzzled deeper into her pillow. Felicia relaxed and blew out her breath with a long, drawn-out sigh. The scrambler
blew out her breath p and nuzzled closer to her pillow. Felicia let out her breath in a long, drawn-out breath. as aere'1111
was in place, and the woman showed no signs that she had been aware of Felicia’s intrusion. She left the patient’s room and returned to the service corridor. She took a few, short steps and stood outside the door to Simmonds’ quarantined room.

“This is it,” she consoled herself. “It has to be this way.” She took a deep breath and pulled the remote to the scrambler from her shirt pocket. It looked like an ordinary, unsuspicious stylus, but it was crucial to the next phase in her plan. She closed her eyes and activated the scrambler.

On the other side of the corridor, alarms began blaring from the woman’s suite. The scrambler had sent false signals to the monitoring equipment, tricking it into thinking the patient was suffering from cardiac arrest. Doctors and nurses streamed into the room. With all eyes in the clinic focused across the hall, Felicia walked undisturbed through the quarantine door into Daryl’s room.

Felicia had not been anticipating finding the doctor standing next to the pilot, reading a tablet and looking at the displays from the monitoring equipment. She had been operating under the belief that the pilot was quarantined and alone. She had seconds to decide her next move. The doctor turned around and saw Felicia as she hesitated at the door. He did not seem to give her a second thought and returned his attention to the man in the bed covered with bandages.

Felicia slid one hand in her pocket and wrapped her fingers around one of the injectors. She walked up to the doctor’s left side and held up her tablet in front of him. “Doctor?” she said, trying to mask the nervousness in her voice. “Can you help me understand these readings?”

He took the tablet from her hands and bowed his head down to read. She placed one hand on the top of his head and forced it hard against his chest as she pushed the injector against the side of his neck. There was a small hiss of air as she gave him a small portion of the injector’s contents.

He drooped and sagged, dropping the two tablets onto the patient’s bed. She caught him before he fell to the ground and carried him over to the nearby chair to sleep it off. The dose Felicia gave the doctor was enough to knock him out, but not enough to cause any long-term damage. The rest was for the suffering pilot.

She walked over to his bedside and looked down on him. He was covered head to toe in bandages, wrapped like a mummy from the ancient history museum tours she took in school. As hard as she tried, she could not remember what the pilot had looked like. The only details she could remember were that he was young and he was innocent.

Nevertheless, that did not matter anymore. He was past saving and within her hand, she carried the quickest way to end his suffering. If she did not do it, he would continue to fall apart until nothing but bandages would be holding him together. Alternatively, he would live out his life in a stasis tube like the others, a living, breathing mummy. There was not a doctor on the planet that could change that.

She held the injector up to the IV bag and inserted the remainder of the potent neuroleptic. She emptied the second injector into the bag as well. His life had been forfeit the moment Garrett offered him that flask of water. She stood by his bed, offered a pathetic apology for her actions, and begged for the forgiveness that would never come.

She turned away from his bed and walked out into the service corridor. The false alarm across the hall had been resolved. She heard a woman’s voice yelling about proper attachment of sensors. A twinge of guilt shot through her for causing someone else to take the blame over her act of sabotage.

With her task completed, she needed to change back into her own clothing before someone discovered her unauthorized presence. There was not a great need for her to be in a hurry. The clinic staff would assume a simple malfunction or human error had been behind the false alarm in the elderly woman’s room. When they discovered the unconscious doctor in Simmonds’ room, exhaustion would be named as the culprit behind his collapse. He would wake up in a few hours and tell them about the nurse who forced the injection upon him. They may or may not connect her to the pilot’s unexpected death, but she planned to be far, far away if it happened.

Felicia had one more task she needed to complete before the night was done, and she knew it was going to be much more difficult. She was certain their enemies would also be after Jack Evans.

She managed to evade detection and get out of the clinic before the alarms that announced Daryl Simmonds’ passing began to sound. She returned to the locker room, hid in one of the toilet stalls, and changed back into her own clothing. She felt more comfortable in her own clothes, but also felt more conspicuous until she covered herself in the maintenance coveralls she had borrowed to get into the service corridors.

She forced herself to walk at a calm, steady pace as she left the clinic and headed back to the freight lift that would take her down to the residential levels. She pressed the call button for the lift and found a dark corner to wait in.

She squatted down on her heels and leaned back against the cold concrete walls. Her eyes burned as she waited for the lift to arrive. She buried her face in her hands, her shoulders convulsing with every sob that echoed through the concrete maze.

“God in Heaven, forgive me!” she cried.

FORTY-FOUR

Gideon searched through thousands of security feeds in his task of tracking Evangeline while Jack was sitting at the virtual replica of his office desk.

He had almost completed a diagnostic of Gideon’s final upgrade when the doorbell rang, echoing from the physical world, and jarring their virtual search efforts. Jack tapped a glowing button on his desktop console, which activated a display. The feed from the front door security camera popped up, revealing the person who had interrupted his thought process.

An Angel was standing at the door. Jack scratched the whiskers of his chin and furrowed his eyebrow. Gideon noticed Jack’s confused stare and used his hacking skills to activate the door camera to the unit across the hall. Jack turned around and saw the new display of his front door hovering among the hundreds of other images. With a quick swipe of his hand, he cloned the feed from his neighbors’ front door camera and zoomed onto the Angel. He could not think of a reason why there would be an Angel at his door this late at night, and dressed in a manner he could only describe as
sporty
business casual
.

The striking image of an angel out of uniform caused Jack to think about the typical robes worn by every other Angel he had ever known. Female Angels wore a two-piece garment. One piece covering their body from their neck to their feet in one long flowing gown. The other piece was similar to a shawl, but longer and cuffed at the wrist. The males wore a similar shawl, but shorter in the front, and tapered in the back like tuxedo coat tails.

The Angel standing on his doorstep wore a shorter version of the regular shawl, but underneath had on skin-tight leggings that appeared to form straight into slippers on her feet. Her attire suggested she was on her way to a slumber party, not a house call to a stranger. Her face was cast in the same familiar, contented expression Angels wore anywhere else.

Jack had always thought all Angels looked alike, however, he did not work with or around Angels, so he was certain she was not someone he was acquainted with. This unexpected interruption was quite puzzling. Was this a random visit, a wrong address, or somehow linked to recent events?