Devil's Advocate (The X-Files: Origins #2)(40)

“Well … one thing’s clear,” he said when she was finished. “He’s not doing the same thing over and over again. They’re not all killed like Jesus.”

“No, but he’s definitely making some kind of statement. Something else religious,” she said, setting the papers down and sitting back. “I’d bet my life on it.”

Her words seemed to freeze in the air, haunting them both.





CHAPTER 35

Craiger, Maryland

1:38 P.M.

The angel sat cross-legged on the floor, his body running with sweat. Though it was still mild weather outside, inside the sacristy the temperature hovered above one hundred. There was no boiler running in the basement, no space heater, nothing to account for it.

Except the fires of his faith in the grigori.

Except the fires in his own flesh. Not the parts of him that were still human. The rest. The parts that were revealing themselves as nephilim, as a giant, not in size but in power, in glory, in understanding.

The Book of Enoch spoke about the grigori—whom the ancients called the Watchers—and how they left heaven to try to take control of humanity, that race of naughty, errant children. The glorious great ones had even married among humans, producing the nephilim, hoping that their own majesty would spread like a plague of greatness through the generations of man.

That had been a glorious thing.

That it had failed spoke more to the weakness of men than any fault of the Watchers. Men, though weak in the ways of the spirit, were as strong as they were stubborn when it came to following their greed, their lusts. They built their worlds with walls and towers and closed out the grigori. And the seed left behind, the nephilim offspring, became few and were scattered until no one of grace stood among the human herd. And the humans, those who bore no trace of holy blood, labored to destroy the nephilim, labeling them as devils, as demons, as witches, and hunting them to the edge of extinction. Sickened and sad over what man had become, the last of the grigori left the mortal plane and sealed the door behind them.

Until now.

Until he was born. Until he awakened within his own flesh and understood his nature, his mission, his purpose.

Until he realized that he was so much more than human.

Until he heard the soft, faint cries of others like him, trapped inside drab husks. Begging for release. Begging for him to free them.

It was his sacred duty to draw the nephilim forth to reclaim their heritage and then together break through the door that separated this world from the one into which the Watchers had gone.

And that work was going so very, very well.

The painting, though, was a challenge. It had taken him years to discover what the shape of the door needed to be. Not a simple portal, not a square or oblong window, but instead a portrait of a grigori. But how to do that? The Watchers were, in their truest forms, formless. Their nature was the furnace of life, of transformation, of magnificent change.

How to paint that?

The angel looked at what he had rendered. The grigori could speak to him through it, but it was not yet complete, and the words, the lessons from the other side, were not always clear. It was not yet a doorway.

He did not yet have enough blood to complete his sacred task.

His paintbrush lay on the floor next to the cold purity of his knife.

There was still so much to do.





CHAPTER 36

Hale Residence

3:37 P.M.

Dana and Ethan went through it all again, every page of the case files, every awful photo, every line of the nearly incomprehensible medical reports.

They wound up at exactly the same place.

“Look,” said Ethan, “if Maisie was killed like Jesus, then maybe the other deaths were meant to look like other famous deaths. Maybe it’s only that we can see the Jesus injuries because they’re more well known. The others might not even be religious at all.”

“Maybe,” Dana said dubiously, “but I kind of think they might be.”

“How? ESP or—?”

“No. I just think it.”

Ethan sighed. “That’s not very scientific, though. We need to build on actual evidence, don’t we?”

“It’s a theory,” she said defensively. “Theories are part of science.”

“Sure, but maybe we should bag it for now,” said Ethan. “I’d kind of like to share all this with the science club.”

“Okay, but what if they can’t help? It’s not like we can bring the case files for them to go through,” said Dana, getting a little heated.

“Then we…,” he began, but trailed off, clearly not knowing where else to go. “We can’t talk to my uncle about it, that’s for sure.”

“No,” she agreed, “but maybe we should go to the library. They’ll have books on how other religious people died. How did Moses die or Daniel or any of them?”

“That’s good,” he said, nodding. “But I just thought of something. The crown of thorns and the spear in his side were all how Jesus died, right? Well, Maisie’s family is Jewish.”

“So was Jesus,” countered Dana. “But I don’t think that matters. It’s probably more important what’s going on in the head of the killer.”

“The angel,” he said, and she heard the skepticism in his voice.