Thomas Sniegoski - In the House of the Wicked

The entire building was shaking again, the fight above intensifying. He had no idea what the two sorcerers were capable of; it was a distinct possibility that the city could be destroyed as a result of their confrontation.

He took her hand and started to pull it away.

“I need to go, Angelina,” he told her.

“I have some of their life still inside me,” she said.

Remy didn’t understand.

“When I began the angels’ message, some of those who were listening passed away, and their life energies were passed into me,” the golem child said.

“Didn’t Stearns…”

“He received some, but not all. When the power went out, for a little bit, there was still energy flowing into me.”

“I don’t understand what that has to do with me,” Remy told her.

“I can use that power… I can wake it up,” she said.

Remy cocked his head, still unsure where this was going.

“The thing inside you,” the child said. She pulled her hand from his, laying it flat against his chest. “I can give it the strength it needs…the strength you need…”

“What are you…” Remy started to ask, as a surge of something entered his chest.

He cried out, falling backward as something exploded inside him. He lay in the rubble-strewn hallway, the sound of magickal conflagration happening all around, and felt the fires surge inside him.

“What did you do?” he croaked, his body now racked with incredible pain as the spark of the Seraphim surged hungrily to life.

“I’ve given it what it needs,” the child said, barely able to keep her eyes open, her head lolling to one side. Her skin had taken on a sickly gray pallor, more like cold stone-or wet clay-than flesh.

Fire trailed from Remy’s fingertips, but it was a fire the likes of which he had never known. It was a fire fed by life, and it burned hotter and faster than the divine fire that had been stolen from him. It filled his mind with the experiences of thousands, pieces of their lives; moments of tenderness, joy, hope, fear, misery, and sadness. All these were now his, part of the fire that fed his angelic nature, making it drunk on the life forces of thousands.

It took everything that Remy still had to keep his power in check; it wanted to explode from him, to wreak vengeance on those who had humbled it so. It wanted to make them all pay.

And while it was at it, it would make the world pay.

“No,” Remy roared, flexing the muscle of his will. He had finally unified his dual natures and was not about to let that of the Seraphim rip free now, no matter how much this new power desired to do so.

Remy had fought too hard to make this so.

Angelina looked even worse than she had before, her once-beautiful dark hair now dried and brittle like straw and falling from her head as the life left her.

“It will soon be dark for me again,” she said, withered hands playing feebly with a clump of hair that had fallen into her lap.

Remy breathed in and out, holding on to the power-to the myriad emotions that threatened to push him over the edge.

“But that’s all right,” she told him. “As long as we were able to stop this…”

The building violently shook, dust and pieces of ceiling raining down, as the shadows around them unnaturally started to expand.

“As long as you are able to stop this.”

He felt compelled to hold her as life ran out, and he knelt down amid the rubble and put his arms around her.

“The angels’ message was a lie,” she told him sleepily. “But I heard another.”

Remy looked down at the artificial child, startled to see that her childlike features were now completely gone. It was like he was looking at the beginning of a clay sculpture, the rudimentary shape implying that it would soon resemble the human form.

“There was another message,” Angelina said, a blocky hand of clay now reaching up to rest on his shoulder. “And I think it really was from Him…from God.”

Remy was silent, feeling nothing but sadness as this special life-form readied to leave the world.

“And He told me what to do,” she whispered softly. Eyes that were little more than dark impressions in the clay but still somehow able to convey emotion gazed up at him.

“He told me to give it to you,” she said. “To give you the power…that you would know…”

The child went quiet then, and he knew that she was no longer with him. Gently he set the primitive clay shape dressed in a little girl’s pajamas down on the ground, showing as much tenderness as he would have shown any once-living thing that had just sacrificed so very much.

The battle continued to rage on the floor above as well as inside him. The Seraphim inebriated on the sustenance of life wanted to join the fray, to smite the wicked for what they had done.

But the Seraphim was blind to the true strength of the power it would be up against, power that easily rivaled its own. He needed to be careful in how he dealt with this.

Leaving the child’s body to the encroaching shadows, he climbed the broken steps toward the battlefield, Angelina’s final words echoing at the forefront of his mind.

He told me to give it to you…that you would know.

As Remy reached the studio floor and witnessed the terror that was unfolding there, he hoped that the child’s faith in him…that His faith in him was not in vain.

He hadn’t expected to wake up facedown on his living room floor, the droning sound of a television test signal buzzing in his ears.

Steven Mulvehill rolled onto his back and sat up, a wave of dizziness and intense nausea almost putting him down again. As he sat there, he felt a tightness on the skin beneath his nose and carefully brought his fingers there to find a wet, tacky substance that was revealed to be drying blood.

“What the fuck?” he muttered. Sure that the swimming in his head had passed, he attempted to stand. Swaying slightly, he stared at the television screen and at the message displayed there: We are temporarily experiencing technical difficulties. Thank you for your patience!

He remembered the child on the TV and how she had begun to speak, and then he remembered nothing. In his gut he knew that she-the child-had something to do with what had happened.

Mulvehill walked drunkenly from the living room into the kitchen, tearing off a sheet of paper towel and sticking it beneath the faucet to wet it. He wiped the drying blood from beneath his nose. The droning alarm of technical difficulties was replaced with the sound of voices, and he returned to the living room to see if there was any explanation for what had just occurred.

There was only one anchorperson now, and she looked a little worse for wear, her blouse and normally perfectly coiffed hair disheveled. He had to wonder if the same thing that had happened to him, had happened there in the studio. In the back of his mind he remembered a story about a Japanese television broadcast of some cartoon show that had triggered seizures in many of those who had been watching.

Has something like that happened here? he wondered.

He caught the tail end of the anchor’s explanation about losing the signal from Angelina’s broadcast, but she then began to talk about breaking news: There was an emergency being reported at the Hermes Plaza, where the child had been delivering her message.

Mulvehill was riveted in place, standing in the center of the living room as a live shot filled the screen. It was an aerial view of the Plaza, the focus on the smoldering upper floor of the Hermes office building. Mulvehill gasped at the sight, his mind already trying to fill in all the gaps of what could possibly have happened. Through the smoke he could see the twisted wreckage of the rooftop, girders bent by some powerful force sticking up through the thick, billowing smoke. Mulvehill found himself moving closer to the television screen, trying to make out what was happening through the smoke. There was a sudden flash behind a billowing gray cloud and the rumble of what could have been an explosion. The picture suddenly went to hissing static, the signal from the helicopter’s camera failing.