The Fallen 4 (2 page)

“How did you get down here?” a man asked as he stepped out from behind the door. He was an older man, dressed in a doctor’s lab coat, his shock of white hair looking as though it hadn’t been brushed in quite some time.

Jeremy didn’t recognize the man at first, in the dim light of the tunnel, but then realized that he was one of his mother’s doctors.

“Dr. Troughton, it’s me,” his mother said carefully. “Irene.”

The doctor looked at her strangely. “Miss Fox?” he asked. “Miss Fox, what are you doing down here? It’s not at all safe. You should be in bed.” He chastised her, but he did not lower the pistol.

“I’m supposed to be here, Doctor,” she told him. “We’ve come for the child.”

Troughton looked as though he’d been slapped. “Child? I—I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about,” he sputtered, stepping back to close the door. “Go back to your room at once, and tell the nurse that—”

“We’ve come for the child.” Jeremy’s mother reached out to hold the door. “My son and I.” She glanced back at Jeremy with a smile.

“Your son,” Dr. Troughton repeated, taking a look for himself.

Jeremy still held his burning ax and did nothing to hide it.

“We’re supposed to have him,” his mother said. “Let us in before it’s too late.”

The doctor seemed confused, his mouth quivering, unable to release the words he wanted to say. He pointed the gun at Jeremy.

Instinct kicked in then. Jeremy’s wings of smoky gray suddenly manifested and in one powerful push sent him hurtling through the air, as he brought the blade of the battle-ax down.

His mother screamed as Troughton stumbled back, holding the remains of his firearm. Jeremy’s cut had been precise, slicing the barrel but sparing the doctor’s fingers.

“I don’t care for guns,” Jeremy snarled as his wings furled closed.

Troughton dropped the remains of the gun to the floor.

“Oh, m-my,” the doctor stammered, running a tremulous
hand across his brow, which was shiny with sweat. “We were told to expect someone… but I never would have imagined it would be you,” he said to Jeremy’s mother.

She smiled. “Can we see the boy?”

“The boy?” Jeremy interjected.

“Yes, it’s a baby boy,” his mother said, turning her attention back to Troughton.

“Of course you can see him,” the doctor said, motioning them into the passage. “Quickly now. We haven’t much time.”

The doctor pulled the heavy door closed behind them and slid the dead bolt home.

Without another word he walked them along another stone hallway, which pitched downward, traveling even deeper below the psychiatric hospital.

Jeremy’s curiosity was getting the better of him. He was about to ask the doctor where the passage led, when they passed through another doorway into an even larger chamber that looked as though it might once have been the hospital’s laundry. A small medical staff awaited them.

“Dr. Troughton?” asked a younger doctor of Pakistani descent.

“It’s all right, Rajat,” the doctor said. “These are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

Jeremy’s mother waved. “Hello!” she called out, her display causing Rajat and the others to look at each other with concern.

“Where’s the child?” Troughton asked.

“Bea has taken him to be cleaned up,” a woman in nurse’s attire said.

“And the mother?” Troughton strode to a curtained-off area and pulled the drape back.

“She expired less than five minutes ago,” Rajat said.

Dr. Troughton walked away from the bed, and Jeremy caught sight of the body of a young girl—she couldn’t have been any older than sixteen—lying there, as pale as a ghost. He didn’t know why, but he felt drawn to her, even though he would have preferred to look away.

“Who was she?” he asked.
She was pretty,
he thought.
Even in death she’s pretty.

Nobody answered him, so Jeremy asked a little bit louder, and a little more forcefully.

“I asked, who was she?”

The nurse looked to Troughton and Rajat. “We don’t know,” she answered, walking to the bed and covering the corpse with a blanket.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” Jeremy asked. “There’s a dead girl lying here, and you haven’t a clue as to who she was?”

“She was the vessel for the child,” Troughton said. “That’s all we know… all we’re supposed to know.”

Right then a newborn squalled, and a woman in scrubs emerged from the back of the chamber, carrying an infant swaddled in a green hospital blanket.

“Oh, there’s the little tinker,” Jeremy’s mother said as she headed for the baby, her arms outstretched.

The nurse looked to Troughton, terrified. The doctor nodded, and begrudgingly the nurse handed her the babe.

“Aren’t you darling,” Jeremy’s mother said, bouncing the fussing child until he began to quiet. She carried the baby over to Jeremy, pulling down the blanket for him to see.

“Look at him,” she said, enraptured by the newborn. “Have you ever seen anything so perfect?”

Jeremy hadn’t been around babies much, and they made him very nervous with all that crying.

“Now what?” he asked his mother.

“We take him somewhere safe.”

Jeremy couldn’t stand it anymore. “Mum, it’s a
baby
,” he said. “Why are we the ones to have him? You’re gonna have to give me something more.”

The baby began to cry again, and his mother gently shushed the child until he quieted down.

“He’s supposed to be with us,” she told Jeremy. “That’s all you really need to know right now.”

Jeremy wasn’t used to such resolution—such sanity—from his mother. “Mum, it’s—” he began.

“We are to protect him with our lives,” she interrupted. “Or what we see in the world now… what you’re feeling now? It will all be so much worse.”

Jeremy was about to question her more, when he noticed
the others’ activity. They hurried about, attending to several clocklike devices throughout the room.

“Hold on here,” Jeremy bellowed.

Rajat squatted near one of the devices on an old, wooden folding table, activated it, and moved on to the next.

“Those are bombs?” Jeremy asked.

“Yes,” Rajat replied. “And they’ll go off in a minute’s time.”

“Are you bloody insane?” Jeremy roared.

“The child’s birth… ,” Troughton started to explain, but he looked as though he were having a difficult time. “The child coming into this world—they’re going to know about it.”

“Who?” Jeremy demanded. “Who’s going to know about it?”

“The Architects,” Troughton said. “The Architects will come, but he’ll be gone. Gone with you. No one will be alive to tell them anything.”

“The Architects? Who are the bloody Architects?”

And then it hit him like a physical blow.

“Wait a second. Nobody here alive?” Jeremy asked aloud. “You’re not planning on being here when the bombs—”

Rajat took a seat on the floor near one of the explosives. The nurses did the same.

“We’re ready, Doctor,” Rajat said with grim finality.

Troughton nodded, reaching into the pocket of his lab coat and removing a remote control.

“This is bloody madness!” Jeremy exclaimed. He looked
to his mother, who was still trying to calm the fussy newborn. “Mum, do you hear this?”

“We have to go, Jeremy,” she replied.

A high-pitched beep sounded as the timers began their countdown.

“Godspeed,” Troughton said. “Keep the child safe.”

“From the Architects, whoever they are,” Jeremy mumbled, going to his mother’s side.

“From the Architects and the evil of the world at large,” Troughton said as he lowered himself to the floor, leaning against the stone wall with a sigh.

“Jeremy!” his mother insisted.

There wasn’t enough time to go out the way they’d come.

Jeremy called forth his wings and pictured where he wanted to go, away from the hospital. The timer was down to seconds as he wrapped his mother and the newborn within his wings’ feathered embrace.

0:5

He took one last look at these people who had brought this supposedly special child into the world.
Who are you? Who told you to do this?

0:3

Their mouths were moving as they sat there, waiting for their inevitable demise, each of them reciting what could only have been some sort of prayer.

0:1

A prayer for the dying.

0:0

*   *   *

Jeremy, his mother, and the baby appeared at the edge of a stretch of beautifully manicured lawn, which Jeremy remembered strolling across with his mother during one of their visits. They were farthest away from the older, more Gothic buildings of the hospital complex and directly behind the newer buildings that housed the patients.

They watched as, with a roar and the shattering of glass, one of the old buildings fell in upon itself. Fire and black smoke billowed out, as if Hell itself were forcing its way up from the bowels of the earth, clawing its way up into the world above.

“What are we doing, Mum?” Jeremy asked as clouds of smoke filled the sky and tongues of orange flame licked at the surrounding buildings.

“We need to get ourselves and Roger—”

“Roger?”

“That’s his name,” his mother said. “Until he can tell us otherwise. Why? Doesn’t he look like Roger to you?”

“He looks like trouble to me,” Jeremy said. “But that’s beside the point.”

“Don’t you worry your head about a thing,” Jeremy’s mother said, cradling the sleeping child in her arms. “You just leave this up to your old mum.”

Off in the distance Jeremy could hear alarm bells and wailing sirens. He knew that they had to leave this place before they were seen, or whoever… or whatever… came after the baby. After Roger. Jeremy called out his wings again.

“Where to?”

“Someplace with peace and quiet. Someplace by the sea? We always loved the sea, didn’t we, son?”

It was the one thing that they could agree upon at the moment, and he closed his eyes, envisioning a very special place.

They always had loved the sea.

CHAPTER ONE

N
o matter how he looked at it, the Nephilim had failed.

Troubled thoughts played through Aaron Corbet’s mind, over and over again, day in and day out as he fought the forces of darkness that had risen because of the Nephilim’s monumental defeat.

With the sound of fluttering wings and the rending of time and space, Aaron returned to the abandoned Saint Athanasius School and Orphanage, which had become the Nephilim’s home. He smelled of the sweat of violence, and was covered in the blood of monsters. Even the small victories they managed were not enough to take away the true stink of their failure.

Aaron opened his wings in the former library that now served as their television room, to see that he wasn’t the first to return. He could hear the chatter of one of the twenty-four-hour news channels they always had on now.

The Nephilim, the blending of humanity and the angelic in the perfect amalgam of God’s most cherished creations, were supposed to keep the world from harm. They had fought hard against those who had considered them a blight in the eyes of God, and had won the honor of being the earth’s protectors against the unnatural.

But then a heavenly threat had arisen. The Abomination of Desolation, an angel of destruction, had come to the world of man. He’d believed the earth was ripe with evil, and had attempted to destroy the planet.

The Nephilim had fought valiantly. Many had sacrificed their lives for what was only a partial victory. They had prevented the Abomination from ending the world, but they had not been able to stop it from severing the world’s ties to God and Heaven.

And now humanity was suffering. Creatures that had hidden in shadow began to emerge to claim their stake in a world that seemed to have been abandoned by the Lord.

The first thing Aaron’s eyes locked upon in the room was Vilma, and he was reminded of how beautiful his girlfriend was, and how much he loved her.

As if sensing his stare, Vilma turned to look at him. Behind her, Kraus, their resident healer, worked to clean up the newest injuries of the other two Nephilim who’d been out on their own missions. Melissa seemed to have injured her hand. It was bandaged, and she flexed and released it, testing her range of
motion, as Kraus tended to a nasty-looking gash on Cameron’s cheek.

“Are they all right?” Aaron asked Vilma as she came toward him.

Hearing his voice, Gabriel, who had been sleeping in a patch of sunshine, jumped to his feet with a loud bark and ran to his master.

“They’re fine, but I should be asking you the same question,” Vilma said, eyeing him.

Aaron looked down at himself. His clothes were caked with blood and the filth of violent death.

“You stink,”
Gabriel said, then sneezed violently.

“Sorry.” Aaron shrugged.

Earlier he had seen a report on CNN that monsters had taken up residence under the Golden Gate Bridge, preventing any travel between San Francisco and Marin County. Local law enforcement, and even the National Guard, had been called in to deal with these creatures identified as a species of Asian troll called Oni—but the loss of life had been great.

People… civilians… were not meant to deal with creatures such as these, which was why he had stepped in. Normally Aaron wouldn’t have gone alone, but there were other threats, other beasts emerging around the world, so they’d split up.

So many monsters out there now, and so few Nephilim.

“It’s not my blood,” Aaron replied. He flexed the muscles in his back, drawing his black wings beneath his flesh. He suddenly
felt spasms of pain across his body, and stumbled slightly, dropping to one knee on the floor. “Well, not all of it anyway.”

Vilma was by his side in an instant.

“Think the fight might have taken a little bit more out of me than I thought,” Aaron said.

He’d flown to the Golden Gate and attacked before the little bit of sunlight had gone. Since the Abomination had cut off the world from heaven, the daylight hours were becoming shorter, the darkness falling earlier and earlier all around the world. Having confronted creatures like the Oni before, he knew that they disliked the daylight and would likely remain beneath the bridge while the sun was shining.