Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(16)

The woman with her face leaned close and whispered, “He’s coming for you.”

“What? Who?”

The woman suddenly gasped and drew her gun. It was so fast, with an oiled grace that could only have been possible after years of practice. She hooked her fingers on the edge of her jacket, swept it back, released, used her thumb to pop the restraining strap, closed her fingers around the gnarled hard plastic grips, slid the weapon out, raised it, took it into a two-handed grip, held it steady with one finger laid along the trigger guard. And all so, so fast. A heartbeat and then the gun was up. Pointed at Dana … no, pointed past her.

The gun barrel was a black eye, steady and deadly, but the face behind the gun was twisted into a mask of horror.

“He’s here!”

Dana spun around toward the darkness that suddenly filled her bedroom. For one heartbeat there was nothing to see.

And then he stepped out of the shadows.

A man.

The angel of light.

Devil or monster or ordinary man, she didn’t know which.

Tall, painted a cold blue by the spill of moonlight that slanted through her window. Dressed in clothes so dark it was as if he wore garments made of shadows. Wings folded behind his broad back.

But he had no face at all.

His curly black hair framed a face with high cheekbones and a strong jaw, but where there should have been eyes, a nose, and a mouth, there was nothing. Not a mask, she was sure. Nothing.

And yet she knew that he could see her. That he was smiling with the wrong kind of hungers. That he was completely aware of her—both the real her and the fantasy older version in the mirror.

The angel raised his hands, and Dana could see that he was holding up things he wanted her to see.

In his right hand he clutched several long, wickedly sharp iron nails.

In his left he held a crude mallet made of hardwood and steel.

The fingers of both hands were smeared with blood.

“Run,” whispered the older Dana. “I’ll try to hold him here. Run … run!”

Dana could not run. She couldn’t move. She could barely breathe.

The wings behind the angel’s back suddenly rustled, and then they spread out, huge, broad, filling the room behind him. The moonlight showed them to her with crystal clarity. They were not the soft, beautiful feathered wings of an angel of heaven.

They were the black, leathery, mottled wings of something from the pit of hell.

Dana screamed herself awake.





CHAPTER 15

Craiger, Maryland

3:58 A.M.

The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by thousands of pieces of broken mirror, each reflecting a different version of his face.

Some of them showed him as the world saw him, and he disregarded them with nothing more than a smirk. He knew that people loved masks because the truth was too frightening for small and ordinary minds.

Some of the mirror splinters showed the face of the angel. Not one face, but many faces, because an angel is different to everyone who sees it. It, not him. Angels are above gender, above sexual identity. They are above everything that defines a being as human. And he, by his own definition, was not.

There were other faces in the shattered fragments. Faces of monsters, faces of great beauty, faces of stone and metal and wood. Faces of such abstract forms that only a deeply insightful eye could see them as faces at all.

And then there was the one face that looked back at him from the largest of the shards. His true face. A face no one had ever seen or even glimpsed except when he revealed it to them.

Usually, though, the people to whom he showed his true self were so busy screaming that they could not appreciate the majesty of who he was.

He wondered if the girl would be able to see his true face when the time came. He hoped so.

He wanted her to. Just as he wanted to bring her into the family, to share with her the secrets of the Red Age, of the grigori and nephilim. He was certain that she would embrace the truth once she heard it.

A photograph of the girl rested on the floor next to that special fragment of mirror. The picture was in color, very sharp. In it the girl was standing in her bedroom, buttoning her pajama top. She had lovely red hair. It was as red as the hair of Judas the Betrayer. He reached out and ran his finger across her picture, pausing briefly at her soft young throat.

Around him the shadows crouched at the edges of the candlelight.





CHAPTER 16

The Observation Room 4:01 A.M.

Danny, the technician, took off his headset and tossed it onto the console. He lit a cigarette, put his feet on the edge of the console and crossed his ankles, and blew a stream of blue smoke into the air. Gerlach sat at a table behind him, slowly stirring packets of sugar into a coffee cup. Eight empty packets lay on the table, and Gerlach reached for a ninth.

“Some of them actually see him, right?” asked Danny.

“Some,” said Gerlach.

“Isn’t that a potential danger? I mean, it’s a small town.”

Gerlach snorted. “That’s part of his skill set.”

“I don’t follow.”

“He controls how they see him,” said the agent.

“Oh … that’s…”

“Creepy?” suggested Gerlach.

“Or something like that,” admitted Danny. “Freaky. Weird. Out there. Not sure what kind of label fits.”