Faith Hunter: Host

Some theologians label Dragons satanels. According to scripture, they had been chief angels or seraphs in heaven until they followed Lucifer’s lead and rebelled against the Most High. The First Battle recorded in the Revelation of John between the ArchSeraph Michael and the followers of the Light, and the Great Red Dragon and his followers—the Powers and Principalities of the Dark—was near mythic. In it, the Red Dragon and a third of those who had followed him had been swept away. They had landed on Earth back before humans started to keep written records, and continued the fight.

The battleground of Earth got a lot more bloody in the Last War between the Dark and Light, which took place a little over a hundred years ago. Some scholars say there were twenty Dragons rechained back then. Some say a hundred. But everyone agreed they were bad business, impossible to kill, and almost as difficult to imprison. The total followers of Darkness, counting spawn, still number in the hundreds of thousands, if not the low millions. Not that there’s any kind of intel to back that up.

I opened a beer and studied the label. On it was a big bear, standing on a hind leg in the midst of a jig, a foaming mug in his paw and a big grin on his face. “The binding of a Dragon sometimes requires blood,” I said. Cheran nodded. I turned the beer, inspecting the bottle, putting my thoughts together.

I could have told the story with all the dramatic wiles at a mage’s beck and call. Instead I said baldly, “In the campaign of the Last Battle, a key skirmish was fought here in the mountains. The ArchSeraph’s lieutenant, Zadkiel, was losing to a Dragon, and was nearly drained unto emptiness”—the correct wording for the deathlike state suffered by an immortal being. “Several of his winged warriors had already been drained to husks.

“Benaiah Stanhope, the several-times-great-grandfather of my partner, Rupert Stanhope, and my ex-husband, Lucas, went underground with the winged warriors and gave his life saving Zadkiel. His blood coated the chain that bound the beast. The locals called him Mole Man.”

Cheran made a little rolling motion with his hand to indicate I should continue. I put down the beer and locked eyes with the slouching, elegant, bored mage. “The Dragon’s second in command took over his territory when the Dragon was bound, and spent the following century creating new beasts and gathering power. You saw some of his handiwork on SNN a couple of weeks back when the skirmish in Mineral City was filmed by a news crew and went out live.”

Cheran nodded, his expression steady. “Spawn, of course. But some of the beasts were like nothing we’d ever seen before,” he said, finally sounding like the emissary he purported to be. “The light was bad and they moved faster than the camera could follow, but they looked like they were composed of body parts of various creatures.”

My eyes went hot and dry, my throat ached. “Dragonets. They were hard as heck to destroy. The Darkness who made them was called Forcas,” I said. “The attack you saw, I think, had a threefold purpose. It was a trial, an assessment, to test its handiwork in battle. And it sent them into town to get the blood of Mole Man’s progeny. And it hoped to free its master.” It also came to get me, but I didn’t say that. “Forcas had somehow acquired a link from the chain that bound the Dragon with Benaiah Stanhope’s blood. Using that, it made a counterconjure, an anticonjure,” I clarified, “and was using the blood of Stanhope progeny to empower it.”

The air burned my dry throat and I put a hand to the swath of ugly white scar tissue there. My throat had been ripped away in the fight and been regenerated by the application of kylen blood. I had survived, but the disfigurement wasn’t pretty. Not that I was complaining. So many had died in the battles that followed.

Audric popped the top from a cold beer and passed it to me. I drank several sips, the moisture softening my dry throat. “A succubus queen had laid eggs in the Trine and a few of us went underground to wipe out the nest. We were too late, but we did manage to free a Watcher, Barak, one allied with the Light.”

Cheran twitched slightly before his face hardened, hiding his reaction. A man with lesser self-control might have sat up straight in his chair, kicking over the table, making a mess.

Watchers were seraphs who had left heaven willingly and acquired sublunary bodies in order to mate with human women. Their pre-historical sin had left them without the ability to transmogrify or to return to heaven. Some had been grievously punished. Many, like Barak, had allied with the Light, while others joined the Dark.

Bluntly, I added, “And we also freed the seraph Zadkiel and his cherub.”

Cheran wasn’t able to disguise his reaction to that. Shock widened his pupils. I was pretty sure he had stopped breathing. My own eyes went hard and dry.

Only a few local humans, the Administration of the ArchSeraph, and I knew that a seraph and his cherub had been trapped in a lair of Darkness. No one else even grasped that the capture of a Major Prince of the Light was possible, and I didn’t know what it might mean in the ongoing war. Over the last century, a list had been compiled of seraphs missing from Regions of Light. How many more were in the clutches of Darkness? And why hadn’t the seraphs gone to rescue them? Questions I had no answers for, and the AAS certainly wasn’t going to enlighten me.

I watched Cheran, who was once again giving nothing away. “We made it back to the surface,” I said, my voice painfully hoarse, my eyes dry as bone. “I was injured. The seraph Raziel joined us battling Forcas at the opening to the hellhole on the Trine. The combat in the heavens took place at the same time as ours. I’m pretty sure it was all tied to the Dragon being set free. I felt something coming.” I blinked, looking at Audric, whom I had left in the town with battles of his own, and who had nearly died following my orders.

“With the combined assets of a cherub’s wheels and seraphic help, we drained Forcas to a husk. In the heavens, even with multiple winged warriors, they were losing to the Dragon. It was getting free. To stop it, the humans with me went back into the hellhole carrying a shoulder-mounted weapon with a bunker-busting nuclear warhead, something new and lightweight the US Army and mages developed. They used it to help close up the entrance and stop the Dragon. They didn’t come back out.”

Audric said, “Only the deaths of two brave human males, multiple beings of Light, the use of a nuclear warhead, and my mistrend’s valiant warfare prevented the Dragon’s freedom. That warfare resulted in Thorn’s grave physical injury and the appreciation of the Council of the Seraphim.”

Cheran looked at my cheek, and at the whiter expanse of scar tissue on my throat, curiosity finally showing on his face. “We heard that humans died saving you,” Cheran said.

“Saving Thorn and the town,” Audric said softly. “Nearly four thousand people would have died to feed that thing if it got free.”

“If I’d killed Forcas on the first try they wouldn’t have died,” I said. “I screwed up.”

Audric said nothing. He hadn’t been there. He’d been fighting the succubus queen I had accidentally bound to me and left temporarily imprisoned in a conjured circle. He’d nearly died keeping the newly hatched succubus queen away from Mineral City. Mistake piled on mistake. Maybe I did need a teacher from Enclave. I had done pretty poorly on my own.

“Let me see if I understand this,” Cheran said slowly, his tone a clarification. “You went underground—underground—to fight Darkness.”

“Twice,” Audric answered for me.

Cheran kept his eyes on me. “The Enclave masters, the ones who made the amulet that keeps you out of my head,” he said with a wry tilt of his mouth, “knew something was happening. They figured out that a beast, a Major Darkness, was trying to get free and they tracked its movements from its prison. They were prepared to send battle mages to the fight, but it ended suddenly. It’s still trapped, no longer bound, but not free either. According to them, it’s in a sort of spiritual and dimensional stasis. You might say it has one foot in this world and one foot in another. But it won’t be frozen in place long. We need a plan before it gets free.”