Iniquity (The Premonition, #5)(93)
“I will gather energy and push it inta ye.” He does, pouring copious amounts of shimmering energy into me. My insides singe from it. I use it to weave an intricate spell of protection around my army. Brennus tests it with his own magic. When it not only holds, but also spits his energy back at him so that he has to jump out of its way, he says, “It’ll do.”
The front door of the house opens up. Emil emerges from it with his hands raised in surrender. A hush falls over the crowd of us watching him. Before I can say the word, “Wait,” a hundred or more beings open fire on him. Emil is riddled with bullets, arrows, throwing stars, and a menagerie of other projectiles. He’s reduced to a bloody pile of flesh in the driveway.
Zephyr, who hasn’t moved, comments on the fact that Anya was one of the first to unload her entire magazine on Emil. “Thrones,” he says to Russell, “need vengeance. Good luck with that.”
Russell replies, “She got him good, though.”
Whatever Zee was going to say fades from his lips as another Emil emerges from the house with his hands up. I cringe. Behind this Emil, a slew of Emils run from the house. They move over the snow, stumbling and getting up to trudge through the drifts.
Russell says, “Remember the paintball fight on the beach, Red? It’s like the Delt Wars. He’s throwing Freshmen at us.” My soul mate is right. It’s just on an entirely different scale.
Reed clarifies, “He’s trying to deplete our ammunition and demoralize us by making us kill his victims.” I choke back the sour flavor in my mouth.
“Nobody fire!” I order. The victims with Emil’s face keep coming. They swarm into the yard with his strawberry-blond hair and his lazy eyes. I want to smash all of their faces in. They trip and stumble toward us. That’s when I realize that some of them are wearing vests covered with incendiary devices.
“Evie,” Reed says while he looks over the edge of the trench.
“I know! I see them!”
“Can you amplify my voice?” Reed asks, his eyes never leaving the fake Emils as they struggle to get to our trenches.
“I think so. I have to come up with a spell—”
“Do it!” he replies urgently, his assassin’s eyes honing in on a fake Emil running across the frozen water of the small pond only yards away.
I whisper a spell over Reed, nodding my head for him to speak. My Power angel looks in the direction of the possessed human wearing Emil’s face. He calls out, “Stop!” My head vibrates with the resonance of his persuasive voice. It echoes and reverberates in my mind causing my brain to rebel as if it were being scrubbed by steel wool. I hold my head in my hands, looking through my splayed fingers. The possessed soul halts only a yard or so from us. “Go find your master. He’s waiting for you to embrace him.”
The soul doesn’t waver for a moment. He turns around and stumbles back across the frozen water. Reed repeats his order. It amplifies over the mass amount of evil souls coming at us. They turn, fighting one another to claw their way back into the door of the house to get to their master. Hissing sounds, like the spray of fire from a flame-thrower, and then BOOM! The house explodes shaking the ground and throwing debris up in the air for miles. Fire and smoke billows up. I straighten, feeling a cautious sense of elation bubble up in me.
My angel grasps my wrist and says through clenched teeth, “Get down!” I have just a second to comply before he pulls me to him and covers me with his body. I catch a glimpse past his shoulder of magical flames traveling at us over the mall in front of where the house used to be. The flames pass over the trenches, moaning. Everything that was in its path is ash in a millisecond. My magic shield is wiped out.
Reed shifts off of me. He leans against the frozen dirt wall and uses the blade of a sword to reflect the area above us. The house is completely gone. It’s reduced to ashes that float around us like snow. In its place is a gigantic gaping hole to another world—a hellscape I only glimpsed once before. I peek over the edge of the trench. It’s as if our world is a solemn, ethereal landscape painting that’s been torn to reveal a dark, sinister masterpiece with blood-red skies underneath. It’s something out of a Bosch nightmare. I cover my mouth as the reek of Sheol hits us all at once. I have to choke back my gag. It is so bad it makes the Trolls smell like perfume.
In the Sheol sky, legion upon legion of fallen angels fly. There’s every type of fallen angel, from Seraphim to Reaper, swirling around in the putrid air. Even with their ability to fly, some angels ride upon the backs of enormous dragons whose scales shine like embers. Dark-winged bulls with polished black horns and hooves ferry other evil angels on their backs. Some Fallen have harnessed teams of powder-white mothmen to carry them in gilded chariots across the sky. Vulgar creature mashups of man and beast hurtle toward the open doorway to our world.
Finding Emil among the fallen angels is impossible. They darken the sky like locusts. The sheer numbers I’m seeing of my enemy is horrifyingly bigger than what I could ever imagine. But they’re not just angels and demons. Evil souls numbering in the hundreds of thousands are being set free from Sheol. They’re spirits—bodiless evil entities—until they find a human host here to possess and inhabit. Once that happens, they’ll be powerful with the ability to maim and kill. We’re outnumbered at least a thousand to one in this fight. My little army doesn’t stand a chance against the malevolence coming for us.