When he remembered like this, he saw their faces, all those who had somehow offended God or posed some sort of threat to the Golden City.
He saw their faces as they were before they died-before he killed them.
He saw them all now, but this time the expressions they wore were different. No longer did they appear surprised or angry or scared.
They seemed amused.
Smiling as if they knew something that he did not.
Francis opened his eyes.
“Now, that sucked,” he said with a grunt, rolling onto his side and attempting to stand.
The motel room where he’d last met with Remy Chandler was completely dark, and he used the side of the small wooden desk to steady himself as he searched the shadows for his companion, worried that he might have gotten lost along the way.
A toilet flushed noisily, and the bathroom door opened, illuminating the room in fluorescent harshness.
“Oh, good. You’re awake.” Angus stumbled back into the room, looking like death warmed over. “For a minute there I thought I might’ve killed you.”
“You thought you might have killed me?” Francis asked. The room seemed to be moving beneath his feet, and he pulled out the desk chair to sit down and ride out the storm.
Angus dropped down on the room’s double bed, mattress coils screaming out in protest. “I would have died if I hadn’t fed,” the sorcerer explained. “But I took only enough to keep on living.”
“So I’m guessing you’re not talking about room service or a quick jaunt to the burger joint down the street,” Francis said, not the least bit happy about where he knew this was going as he realized how weak he was feeling.
The sorcerer shrugged.
“You’re like the asshole that almost killed us in New Orleans,” Francis said, his voice becoming louder.
Angus nodded. “Like Stearns…yes.”
“You fed off me,” Francis stated, the words dripping with fury.
“Only a little,” Angus defended himself. “Stearns took so much from me that I would have died if I hadn’t-”
Francis was up with his gun drawn in a blink.
“If you hadn’t had taken a few nibbles from the Francis snack bar,” he finished, aiming the pistol at Angus’ fat, flushed face.
Angus raised his hands in surrender. “I would have asked if you had been conscious, but I had no idea when you were going to wake up. And this way at least one of us would be able to alert someone to Stearns’ plans.”
Stearns’ plans.
Even though he wanted to perforate the sorcerer’s round face, Francis lowered his gun and returned it to the bottomless pocket inside his suit coat.
“Tell me about this Stearns character,” he said, sitting on the desk chair before he fell down. “I thought the problem was with somebody named Deacon.”
Angus lay on the bed, legs splayed, head back against the headboard. “It appears that I was mistaken. It’s not the betrayed reaching out to kill us from beyond the grave at all… It’s one of our own.”
“And the mouths on his hands?” Francis asked, holding up his own as examples. “What the fuck’s up with that?”
“I told you before: The cabal was part of an experiment to use the life force of living things as an energy source, and it achieved everything we had hoped. But there was a price to pay, one that we didn’t realize at first.”
“It gave you nasty little mouths on your hands,” Francis said. He reached into his coat pocket and removed a crumpled pack of cigarettes. If there was ever a time for a smoke, it was now. He offered the pack to Angus.
“Thanks,” the sorcerer said, grabbing a cigarette and leaning forward so Francis could light it. “The magick obviously changed some of us more dramatically than others,” he continued to explain. “It appears, though, that we all must feed on the life energies of living things in order to survive, but I certainly haven’t grown mouths on my hands to do so.”
Francis wasn’t sure that he wanted to ask the next question, but he did, anyway. “So how do you feed?” he asked, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air.
Angus pointed a chubby finger to his mouth. “This works just fine.”
“You put that on me?” Francis felt his ire begin to climb again.
“Just a gentle peck on your cheek,” Angus said.
Francis could see that the fat sorcerer was struggling not to laugh. Maybe he would shoot him after all.
“What an interesting existence you’ve led, Fraciel.”
“Don’t call me that,” Francis warned.
“Aren’t you going to ask how I know about you?” the sorcerer teased.
Francis just puffed on his smoke, knowing that Angus would answer his own question.
“When we feed on your energies, we get a good taste of what you are…who you are…where you’ve been, what you’ve been up to…Your experiences become ours… We live them as you lived them,” Angus explained.
Francis glared across the room.
“No worries,” Angus assured him. “Your secrets are safe with me.”
“You said something about Stearns being up to something.” Francis pinched the still-burning end of the cigarette to extinguish it and dropped the remains into the barrel beside the desk.
“As he fed on me, I tried to feed on him…and I saw that he is very hungry.”
“Thinking an all-you-can-eat-buffet hungry?” Francis asked to help him gauge the level of importance.
“Hungry for the power that only the deaths of countless people would satisfy.” Angus finished his own cigarette, grinding it out on the bedside table and leaving it there.
Francis felt a sudden dip in the temperature of the room and knew it wasn’t a chill from Angus’ statement. The Pitiless pistol was in his grip once again as he stood, his every sense on full alert.
“What is it?” Angus asked nervously, throwing his tree trunk-sized legs over the side of the bed, ready to flee.
“It feels different in here.” Francis carefully stepped away from the desk, attempting to home in on the cause of the disturbance.
“I feel it, too,” Angus said. He extended his arms, fingertips wiggling. “It’s as if something is pulling the energy from the room-”
The fluorescents in the bathroom went dark with a hum, plunging the room into darkness.
“Don’t move,” Francis ordered, blinking to adjust to the sudden loss of light.
The room was awash in shadow, but for some reason he could not take his eyes from the covering of shadow that had appeared on the closet door. There was something about it, blacker than all the other shadows in the room. He moved closer to it, holding out his free hand, and felt an exhalation of cold.
“Got it,” he said, raising his gun to the shadow just as a short, stocky, hooded figure began to emerge. He almost began to fire, but quickly removed his finger from the delicate trigger of the Pitiless pistol when he noticed the form of a teenage girl slung over the creature’s shoulder, and the body of a man he was dragging from the darkness behind him.
Francis’ aim never wavered as the ugly creature let the girl’s still body drop to the floor, then turned to haul the man from the passage of shadow into the room. He would have liked to say that he was surprised to see the unconscious form of Remy Chandler lying on the floor before him, but when it came to his Seraphim friend, nothing surprised Francis anymore.
“Why don’t you tell me what’s going on?” he ordered, aiming at a line of particularly thick wrinkles on the ugly wretch’s forehead.
The small creature slowly raised his eyes, as if realizing for the very first time that he wasn’t alone.
“Why don’t you put down that gun before I forget I’m on a mission of mercy and shove it up your ass?”
Squire glared at the man still holding the pistol on him.
“Okay, how about this: Why don’t you put down that gun before I forget I’m on a mission of mercy and shove it up your ass, please?”
