TWENTY-FOUR

The angel Ramiel knew that Tyler Magowan had spent much of his adult life believing three things.

That God loved him.

That angels watched over him

That some day the Pittsburgh Pirates would stop sucking.

As with most examples of faith, they were things Tyler never expected to see or experience. He would have settled for a winning season from the Bucs, though—something that hadn’t happened in his memory.

Therefore, when Ramiel came to Tyler and asked the young man to be the angel’s vessel on Earth, it surprised him—to say the least.

But not as much as it might have. Unlike most humans, who lived in blissful and willful ignorance, Tyler had noticed the signs that the Apocalypse was nigh. He’d seen such things before, and thought them to be genuine omens, but they had turned out to be random incidents.

The past six months, though, he’d seen a pattern emerging.

Ramiel came to Tyler in a dream, and spoke to him.

“The Lord needs you to give of yourself in the battle for righteousness.”

Tyler was, of course, skeptical. But Ramiel was very convincing.

“This is the wish of the Lord,” Ramiel said coaxingly. “The battle is coming, and Raphael has joined us. So, too, will Michael, whose sword will be found.”

Until the Michael sword was located, however, the angels had to hold the line against the demons. And that meant sacrifices.

Tyler was perfect. He was young, faithful, and single. He was also unemployed, another casualty of the Earth’s inevitable slide into the oblivion of Revelation. Given the opportunity to contribute in the coming battle, he would likely do so with great fire and conviction.

Ramiel had been told that there were demons gathering in San Francisco, at the same time as an interfaith conference was being held at the Moscone Convention Center. This confluence was too good for the demons to pass up—their intent was to possess many of the participants, and slaughter the rest.

The faith of the devout was one of the angels’ primary weapons, and the demoralizing effect of such an attack would be devastating on many levels. Thus Ramiel was ordered to join a contingent of angels led by Uzziel to stop the demons.

Ironically, before Ramiel had revealed himself, Tyler had been planning to attend this conference with several other members of his church. Without hesitation, he agreed.

The vast complex of Moscone Center took up an entire city block, with streets on all four sides. When Tyler/Ramiel first arrived, led by Uzziel and accompanied by a dozen other followers, they sensed no demonic presence—disappointing, but not unexpected. Demons were always finding ways to hide themselves. And he had been told from the outset that it was possible that their intelligence was faulty.

Nevertheless, the angels easily infiltrated the conference, pretending to be attendees. For all that it called itself “interfaith,” Ramiel realized quickly that it was truly a Judeo-Christian gathering. Still, the two religions—fractured though they were in this modern age—maintained considerable common ground, as well as a desire to exercise greater influence over humanity. They longed to wield the sort of influence their ancestors had enjoyed.

Ramiel thought it was a waste of time. True, everyone in medieval Europe had believed in God, and worshipped and swore fealty to the church, but they had done so because they knew no other way. It was faith by habit. Far fewer people in the modern day’s so-called “Western Civilization” considered themselves religious.

Yet in modern America, those who did believe truly believed—not because they had to, but because they wanted to. That was true faith, Ramiel thought. Tyler Magowan didn’t consider himself a Christian out of family tradition or fear that he’d be ostracized from his community if he wasn’t. He simply considered himself a Christian, and conducted himself as one.

Better to have one devout follower than a hundred rote ones, Ramiel decided.

Not everyone agreed, however. He had made the mistake of mentioning this preference to Uriel, which had led to a lengthy diatribe on the subject of human ingratitude. Uriel described the rampant lack of faith as “the mud monkeys abusing their own free will.”

But Ramiel held his tongue. He had always felt that the whole point of being an angel was to see the best in things. And when Uriel turned out to be a traitor, it had reinforced this conviction.

One thing Ramiel couldn’t reconcile was all the death. Too many of his brothers and sisters weren’t here now because they’d died—whether in service of the Lord, as victims of the betrayal by Uriel and his allies, or at the hands of demons.

He hoped this day wouldn’t add to the ranks of the fallen.

With Uzziel, Jophiel, and Selaphiel alongside him, Ramiel went to a session that was being held in Room 105, which was one of the conference rooms just outside the exhibit hall on the convention center’s lower level. The hall itself was currently empty—unlike many who used Moscone’s services, the conference boasted no exhibitors peddling their wares or promoting their services. The sole purpose of this conference was for people of faith to talk to one another.

Room 105 revealed a dozen people gathered in a circle. Most of them were well dressed. One was a Lubavitcher, and he had on a black-and-white suit and sported a full beard and a full head of curly hair sticking out from under his hat. Another was dressed in the black shirt and collar of a Catholic priest.

The rest were in suits.

As with every other room they’d entered in the Moscone Center, this one was bereft of any demonic presence.

In the seat that faced the door sat a woman in a lime green pantsuit. She wore a brooch that was oddly familiar.

“Hello,” she said, “have you come to join our colloquy?”

Uzziel smiled and spoke in a deep, resonant voice. His host was a pediatrician named Pierce—a large, powerfully built African American who had used that voice to convince his patients that it would only hurt for a minute.

“No, thank you,” he replied. “We’d just like to observe, if that’s all right.”

“By all means,” the woman said.

Suddenly, Ramiel recognized the brooch—or, more specifically, recognized the stone in the brooch’s center.

There were only four in existence, and three of them were safely hidden in a church in Cordoba. Ramiel had put them there himself in the fourth century, and if the wards he’d placed around them had been penetrated any time in the subsequent 1700 years, he’d have known.

They had been created by Bishop Hyginus of Cordoba in A.D. 381, the year after the bishop had conspired to have an ascetic named Priscillian executed for heresy. Priscillian had learned that Hyginus was consorting with demons, and Hyginus had used his demonic allies to help convince Pope Damascus I to have Priscillian condemned.

Hyginus had created the four stones to hide a demon’s essence within a possessed body, even from an angel. Ramiel had been sent to confiscate the stones. He had succeeded in retrieving three of them and casting out the demon who had lured Hyginus away from the Lord. Ironically, history would remember Hyginus as a devout Christian who had rid the church of a heretic, and Priscillian as one of the first such heretics.

And Ramiel had never been able to locate the fourth stone.

Now, standing in Room 105 of the Moscone Center, Ramiel didn’t hesitate, didn’t give the demons a chance to tip their hands. Nor did he let them know they’d been discovered.

Instead, without a word, he struck.

With but a gesture, he knocked the woman in the pantsuit to the ground.

The angels all turned to stare at him as if he were mad, and only then did he speak.

“She wears the missing Stone of Hyginus!”

The priest jumped up.

“What on Earth are you people doing?”

Next to him, a man in a charcoal suit and a Liberty of London tie backhanded the priest.

“Shut up, already, will you?” he snarled.

Several chairs started to leap into the air and ricochet off of the walls. Ramiel ducked the one that had been aimed at his head, and it careened away.

“Figures,” the demon with the stone said as its vessel got to her feet. “We get stuck with the one halo who knows what an ancient stone looks like.”

Ramiel leapt across at that demon, catching her squarely in the chest and kicking her across the room. He let his momentum carry him, and then stood over her, shaking his head.

“Only a demon would think of a mere 1700 years as ‘ancient.’” His look reflected his contempt. “You’re pathetic little creatures.”

“Blah blah blah,” the demon said, rising slowly as her eyes went pitch black. “Put it in your wings and rub it, halo.”

Suddenly she let loose with a kick of her own that sent the angel crashing into the table with what might have been a bone-jarring impact. It was Ramiel’s turn to scramble upright, and as he prepared for the demon to follow through, he glanced quickly around the room.

Uzziel had grabbed one of the demons by the head. Smoke poured out of the vessel’s mouth, eyes, nose, and ears, dissipating into nothingness even as the man screamed in agony.

The demon with the stone leapt at Ramiel again. Letting his vessel’s body go limp, Ramiel let the momentum of her leap carry them through the thin wall that separated Room 105 from a lower-level exhibit hall.

Hitting the hard ground, rolling and getting to his feet, Ramiel faced the demon, standing on the bare concrete.

“Is this really the best you can do?” he asked, his words echoing in the cavernously empty hall.

Grinning, the demon also rose.

“Don’t worry, I’m just gettin’ started.”

She reached into a pocket of the pantsuit and pulled out a knife. Ramiel recognized it as similar to the one Castiel had carried, and he wasn’t about to let the demon do anything with it. He reached out and snatched it from her grip.

She offered surprisingly little resistance.

And then Ramiel found he couldn’t raise his arms. Or stay on his feet.

His knees felt as if they were crumbling to dust.

His eyesight started to fail, but with a squint he was able to make out the vicious smile on the face of the demon’s vessel.

“Not feeling so hot, are you, halo? See, I’ve been doing some collecting. Hyginus’s little trinket was just one of my babies, and me and my buddies are—”

The rest of her sentence was cut off by a hand that appeared on her head.

“No! No! Yaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrhhhhhhhh!”

Smoke oozed out of every orifice. Moments later the vessel collapsed to the concrete floor, dead. Her screams continued to echo through the hall.

Only when she had fallen could Ramiel see—barely— that it was Uzziel, recognizable because of his vessel’s imposing size.

Still the life was draining from him.

Ramiel dropped the knife to the concrete floor.

“Destroy it, quickly, Uzziel, before....”

Uzziel winced as the angelus iuguolo claimed Ramiel. He watched the body of Tyler Magowan die, and with it the angel who possessed him.

Uzziel had always liked Ramiel. He had a good heart— even by the high standards of the angels—and had been a fine warrior in the Lord’s cause.

Even if the Lord himself hadn’t been much in evidence lately.

Like many of the higher angels, Uzziel was tired of it. Tired of guiding a humanity that neither wanted nor appreciated their help. After centuries of wars, plagues, tyranny, sin—the Apocalypse was something of a relief.

He had thought the twentieth century, with so many genocides, had been the worst ever. Then the twenty-first had begun with lunatics killing each other by the thousands, in every corner of the globe, and Uzziel knew it wasn’t going to get any better.

When Zachariah came to him with a plan to bring about the end of days—and sooner rather than wait around for it—Uzziel was on board in an instant.

The only part he hadn’t liked was deceiving his fellow angels. Not even when the goal was to draw out Doragon Kokoro. The angels had been certain that this assault was going to be the spirit’s coming-out party, after which he would serve as a powerful weapon in the hands of demonkind.

Few realized just how powerful a weapon the damned samurai would be in the right—or wrong—hands. In so evenly balanced a match, his role could be the tipping point. Zachariah knew that, and he had convinced Uzziel.

When the angelic counter-strike was announced, nobody questioned the orders. Why should they? The host had a very rigid chain of command, and opinions were discouraged. After all, they usually led to betrayal, as had been shown by Castiel.

And Uriel.

And Lucifer.

As it was, the angels had courted disaster. Ramiel’s presence had proved a blessing, since Uzziel never would have recognized the Stone of Hyginus. Sadly, Ramiel had paid the ultimate price via the angelus iuguolo—but so had six of the seven demons, thanks to Uzziel, Jophiel, and Selaphiel. Only one of the creatures had managed to get away.

Ramiel’s sacrifice had served to prove an even greater truth—one Uzziel had suspected all along.

Father had abandoned them. They were on their own.

With a gesture, he atomized the knife. Never again would it claim a sibling.

Then he removed the brooch from the corpse of the woman in the green pantsuit. He planned to place it with the others in Cordoba. Ramiel would, he knew, have wanted it that way.

Leaving the human corpses behind—they were humanity’s problem now and not the concern of the host— Uzziel went back to Room 105 to gather up the surviving angels.

And the war raged on.