Return Of the Fallen. Rita Vetere
and he’d looked forward to it all week.
“I’ll try not to lose the house. Look, it’ll probably turn into an all-nighter. You sure you’ll be okay on your own? Luke said Jessica would be glad to come over and spend the night if you want company.”
“Are you kidding? All I want is a hot bath and then I’m going to bed.” Between working overtime again and the party last night, she was all in. “You go ahead and have fun,” she said through the open car door. “I’m going inside. It’s freezing.”
“Okay, call me on my cell if you need anything.”
She closed the car door and watched him pull away, then turned and hurried up the driveway. Grateful to be out of the cold—it had to be thirty below tonight—she quickly entered the house and shut the door behind her. JB was not at the door to greet her, and she stopped unbuttoning her coat. He was always at the entrance whenever she arrived home. When she heard him barking furiously from the back of the house, her hackles rose. With a growing sense of unease, she walked the few steps to the kitchen, put her hand out and flicked the light switch on the wall to her right. She tensed and took a step back in surprise.
A behemoth of a man stood in the center of the kitchen. She took in his massive shoulders, straining against the fabric of the overcoat he wore, a neck as thick as a tree trunk then looked directly into his flinty eyes. There was a sense of barely suppressed menace about him. He looked as lethal as a cocked gun. JB continued barking frantically from behind the closed mud room door.
Justine shivered inside her heavy wool coat as if the icy wind had suddenly found its way indoors.
“Who the hell are you?” she demanded, certain she sounded a lot braver than she felt.
The man’s meaty hand traveled to his midsection and he unbuttoned his coat. He moved his considerable bulk in her direction without answering.
A kind of blind intuition seized control of Justine before panic had a chance to enter and make itself at home. She surprised herself by streaking to the counter on her left, moving like a blur. Her gaze locked onto the sharpest of the knives in the wooden rack. In the next instant, the knife flew into her open hand, its rubber handle slapping neatly into her palm, blade up. She stared at it for a second, unable to understand how it had gotten there. Her eyes watered as a dull pounding began at her temples. A trickle of warm blood oozed from her right nostril onto her upper lip.
She operated purely on instinct and her arm went back as she took aim, then let fly the knife. With uncanny precision, it embedded itself in the upper part of the man’s arm, just as he reached inside his overcoat for something.
Justine barely had time to acknowledge the impossibility of what she had just done when the man, uttering a cry, stooped to retrieve the gun he had dropped. She moved again, faster than before, and darted back to the front entrance. Bullets ripped through the air around her, whizzing by her head to slam into the door, which forced her to veer left. She flew up the stairs and reached the second floor landing just as the man arrived at the foot of the staircase. Now what? She had managed to trap herself on the second floor. With nowhere else to go, she raced through the first doorway on her right, entered her bedroom and locked the door behind her. She ran for the phone on the nightstand, but a hail of bullets ripping through the door stopped her in her tracks. A burning sensation swept across her ear and the air stirred next to her cheek as a bullet grazed her. She had to get out of the house, away from this maniac, now.
Her arms went up in front of her. She hurtled through the window overlooking the street and followed fragments of glass out into the bitter night. The pavement rushed up to meet her, and she had just enough time to wonder how many bones she was about to break when, incredibly, she landed on her feet in a crouched position on the driveway, unharmed.
And just how the hell had she managed to do that?
The man appeared at the broken window two floors above.
“Israfel,” he called out.
Justine’s vision went dark. She felt the air leave her lungs, making it hard to breathe. Her heart turned over then raced.
Memory returned, arriving all at once, and rolled over her like a tsunami. With it came vivid images that swirled all around her, dancing like bright colors in front of her eyes. Her vision doubled, then trebled, as past and present attempted to meld, making her head spin so badly she collapsed onto the snowy pavement.
She squeezed her eyes shut, opened them and shook her head to clear it. When she regained her feet, the man had disappeared from the upstairs window. In another second, he’d burst through the front door after her.
Justine ran, jumbled memories flapping all around her like swarming bats. She barely registered the glacial wind, or her next door neighbor, Carol, who opened her front door and called out to her as she flew by. She raced blindly along the icy street, the single word the man had uttered roaring like thunder in her ears.
Israfel. He had spoken her name. Her real name.
As she barreled through the frigid night at breakneck speed, tearing along the dark and deserted streets, her past and the man in hard pursuit, the first clear and terrifying memory crashed through. She, a small child, lay on a dusty road. Her mother, backlit by a red summer sun, towered over her. In Mamma’s raised hand a butcher knife glinted in the sunlight, about to descend, to strike her dead. And the words Mamma spoke, “Abomination...not suffered by God to live.”
Chapter 3
Nevada Desert, United States
Raziel sat cross-legged in the desert wasteland under a blistering sun, his eyes narrowed to slits in fierce concentration. A hot, arid wind rolled over him, and his hair lifted and settled in keeping with the movement of the dry desert air. A rattlesnake slithered noiselessly in his direction and glided over his legs as if it had encountered an inanimate object. The snake continued on its way, leaving behind a winding trail in the burning sand. In the cloudless sky overhead, a lone vulture circled.
Eventually the sun faded on the horizon, turning blood red. The wind snatched the last of the day’s heat and the air turned cool. Stars emerged, scattering like diamonds across a black velvet sky. A bloated yellow moon began its ascent.
The passage of time and his surroundings mattered not to Raziel. Time and place were lost to him in his intense state of concentration. He remained motionless in the white sand, fiercely focused on pinpointing the source of the dissonance.
Acutely attuned to the Symphony, Raziel could detect even the slightest disturbance. If a demon entered a mortal’s dreams, Raziel could hear it. If an unseen spirit caused a baby to cry, Raziel knew. Most celestials were unable to hear such subtle disturbances amid all the earthly noise, but a Watcher could, for that is what they had been created to do. They listened for disturbances to the Symphony, the universal flow of all living things in fulfillment of the Great Design.
The disturbance to the Symphony upon which he focused was painfully loud. He had not detected anything like it before, and was not at all pleased that such a gross disturbance had reached him now. For having heard it, Raziel knew he would be compelled to act.
His angelic heart sank at the thought of re-entering the mainstream of humanity, a prospect he found loathsome these days.
Of the original two hundred Watchers sent to Earth thousands upon thousands of years ago, only Raziel remained. Only he had not fallen. His kind was poorly suited to their task. Of the two hundred, Raziel alone had not succumbed to the temptation of beautiful women and earthly delights. For their transgressions, his brethren had been cast out, leaving only him to shoulder the burden of attending to the Symphony.
Loneliness and a sense of abandonment had long ago driven him to seek solitude in the most desolate regions of the world in the hope of freeing himself from the never-ending barrage of disturbances. He had witnessed the unfolding of millennia, and the passage of so much time had left him weary of his task, and of the angelic wars he’d been drawn into over and over again.
As the