Too weak to move, Deacon could only watch in horror as his enemy’s hand grew closer, horrible puckered mouths, like multiple versions of his grandfather’s toothless mouth, hungrily descending.
Deacon wanted to scream but he did not have it within him to do so.
Stearns’ hand fell upon him and the mouths greedily began to feed on what precious little he had left.
And suddenly Deacon found himself transported to another place.
It took him but a second to realize when and where he was.
It was August 6, 1945, and he was standing in the center of a road that led to Hiroshima.
He looked up to the sky, closing his eyes, waiting.
There came a flash so bright that he could see it, even though his eyes were still closed.
And a sound followed that could have been the sound of Creation.
But he knew, in fact, it was the sound of the end.
Remy felt as though he’d been born again.
The Seraphim was whole once more- he was whole once more.
But something was wrong.
Remy’s body swelled with power, his every muscle burning, throwing off waves of intense heat. He tried to rein it in, to calm its fury, but something stirred it to action, and suddenly he knew the cause.
The golem child-Angelina-had filled him with the power of life, and this was what the holy fire was feeding on. The fires were stoked too high.
The sustenance of life was the most splendid and delicious of energies, and he was drunk on its potential. Remy struggled to focus, but he was high on the power that coursed through him.
He needed to do something, to find a way to alleviate this dangerous overflow. His gaze moved across the blighted rooftop before him, falling on the most horrific of sights.
The nearly skeletal Algernon Stearns lay atop the body of Konrad Deacon, feeding on what residual life force still remained within his enemy’s withered corpse.
As if sensing the power in Remy’s stare, Stearns raised his gaze to him.
There was hunger in the old sorcerer’s eyes.
And this time, Remy was happy to oblige him.
He surged upward with a single flap of his powerful wings, dropping down in front of the cadaverous figure. Fear had momentarily surpassed hunger as Stearns looked at him, but that was quickly dispersed as Remy moved closer and extended his hand.
It was like dangling a bloody piece of meat before a hungry dog. At first there was some wariness, and then all sense of caution was jettisoned as the hunger got the better of him and Stearns reached up, wrapping his fingers around Remy’s hand.
The sensation was nauseating, and Remy had to make a conscious effort not to yank his hand away in utter disgust. He could feel the mouths moving against his flesh, sucking away the excessive energies that threatened to overtake him. The intensity of the power that rushed through his body was beginning to diminish, and he could at last begin to focus.
Finally feeling a sense of calm, a sense of peace, Remy tried to take his hand away from the energy vampire, but was met with considerable resistance, the eager mouths on Stearns’ hands sucking all the faster, attempting to take even more than what was being offered.
It was exactly what Remy would have expected from such a creature, and why he had decided to do what he was about to.
Stearns brought his other hand around for even more of the angel’s power, but Remy was faster, snatching the sorcerer’s wrist before he could take hold.
The sorcerer grew frantic, desperate to partake of that much more of the Seraphim’s precious life energies.
But Remy had decided that he had had enough.
Stearns must have seen something in Remy’s eyes, something that told him that he had fed for the last time. In a last-ditch effort, magick exploded from his fingertips, bolts of crisscrossing energy causing the ground before him to detonate explosively as he attempted to flee.
But the Seraphim was not hindered by the magickal display, soaring up and over the mystical conflagration to descend behind the sorcerer.
“Please,” was the last word to escape his mouth, as Remy reached out for him. He grabbed Stearns by the head, and violently snapped his neck like a dry twig.
Remy felt little remorse for the magick user as he released his twitching body, letting it drop limply to the broken ground. There were other, more pressing matters that required his-
“Remy?”
He heard his name carried across the rooftop and turned, in all his angelic glory, toward the sound. He was stunned by what he saw.
At first he thought it some kind of trick, some last bit of magickal mischief perpetrated by the sorcerers that had turned his life around of late, but soon came to realize that she was real.
Ashley.
He was overjoyed to see her and about to approach when he saw the expression on her face.
How long has she been standing there? What did she see me do?
It was an expression of fear.
Thomas E. Sniegoski
In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
A shley felt something inside her brain let go.
It wasn’t that she had been kidnapped and taken away from everything she loved… It wasn’t that she had just killed someone, hacking him with a sword until he was bloody and unmoving…
It was stepping from the shadows, Squire by her side, to see him.
Him. My Remy.
At least, she thought it was him, but why did he look that way? Why was he glowing as if he were blazing hot, and wearing armor, and…
Are those wings?
She was still overjoyed to see him, and was about to cry out when she saw- heard — what he did to the person he was struggling with.
As the muffled snap of the person’s neck filled her ears, something went inside her as well, and she knew that nothing-no matter how hard she wanted it to be-would ever be the same again.
“Remy.”
She hadn’t even known that she had spoken; his name was just suddenly there, dropping from her lips like the twitching body that fell from her friend’s grasp.
He had been looking toward the open sky at the swirling black whirlpool.
Here was something else that had changed: She’d never seen a whirlpool in the sky before, and she had to wonder what else had changed in the world since she had been gone…
Or have these things always been here and I just couldn’t see them? It was something to think about.
As a little girl, she had always wondered about the life Dorothy had led after coming back from Oz… How had it changed her? She couldn’t be the same old Dorothy anymore.
Remy was looking at her now, and he seemed happy to see her, but the way he looked…and what he had done…
Ashley could see it on his face. He was actually coming toward her when he stopped.
She’d never been very good at hiding how she was feeling, and right now she was terrified of him…of what he was.
Maybe it was just like in the movie, and the scarecrow was Hunk the farmhand, and the Wicked Witch was
