Thomas Sniegoski: In the House of the Wicked

The sensation was nauseating, and Remy had to make a conscious effort not to yank his hand away in utter disgust. He could feel the mouths moving against his flesh, sucking away the excessive energies that threatened to overtake him. The intensity of the power that rushed through his body was beginning to diminish, and he could at last begin to focus.

Finally feeling a sense of calm, a sense of peace, Remy tried to take his hand away from the energy vampire, but was met with considerable resistance, the eager mouths on Stearns’ hands sucking all the faster, attempting to take even more than what was being offered.

It was exactly what Remy would have expected from such a creature, and why he had decided to do what he was about to.

Stearns brought his other hand around for even more of the angel’s power, but Remy was faster, snatching the sorcerer’s wrist before he could take hold.

The sorcerer grew frantic, desperate to partake of that much more of the Seraphim’s precious life energies.

But Remy had decided that he had had enough.

Stearns must have seen something in Remy’s eyes, something that told him that he had fed for the last time. In a last-ditch effort, magick exploded from his fingertips, bolts of crisscrossing energy causing the ground before him to detonate explosively as he attempted to flee.

But the Seraphim was not hindered by the magickal display, soaring up and over the mystical conflagration to descend behind the sorcerer.

“Please,” was the last word to escape his mouth, as Remy reached out for him. He grabbed Stearns by the head, and violently snapped his neck like a dry twig.

Remy felt little remorse for the magick user as he released his twitching body, letting it drop limply to the broken ground. There were other, more pressing matters that required his-

“Remy?”

He heard his name carried across the rooftop and turned, in all his angelic glory, toward the sound. He was stunned by what he saw.

At first he thought it some kind of trick, some last bit of magickal mischief perpetrated by the sorcerers that had turned his life around of late, but soon came to realize that she was real.

Ashley.

He was overjoyed to see her and about to approach when he saw the expression on her face.

How long has she been standing there? What did she see me do?

It was an expression of fear.

Thomas E. Sniegoski

In the House of the Wicked: A Remy Chandler Novel

A shley felt something inside her brain let go.

It wasn’t that she had been kidnapped and taken away from everything she loved… It wasn’t that she had just killed someone, hacking him with a sword until he was bloody and unmoving…

It was stepping from the shadows, Squire by her side, to see him.

Him. My Remy.

At least, she thought it was him, but why did he look that way? Why was he glowing as if he were blazing hot, and wearing armor, and…

Are those wings?

She was still overjoyed to see him, and was about to cry out when she saw- heard — what he did to the person he was struggling with.

As the muffled snap of the person’s neck filled her ears, something went inside her as well, and she knew that nothing-no matter how hard she wanted it to be-would ever be the same again.

“Remy.”

She hadn’t even known that she had spoken; his name was just suddenly there, dropping from her lips like the twitching body that fell from her friend’s grasp.

He had been looking toward the open sky at the swirling black whirlpool.

Here was something else that had changed: She’d never seen a whirlpool in the sky before, and she had to wonder what else had changed in the world since she had been gone…

Or have these things always been here and I just couldn’t see them? It was something to think about.

As a little girl, she had always wondered about the life Dorothy had led after coming back from Oz… How had it changed her? She couldn’t be the same old Dorothy anymore.

Remy was looking at her now, and he seemed happy to see her, but the way he looked…and what he had done…

Ashley could see it on his face. He was actually coming toward her when he stopped.

She’d never been very good at hiding how she was feeling, and right now she was terrified of him…of what he was.

Maybe it was just like in the movie, and the scarecrow was Hunk the farmhand, and the Wicked Witch was actually Miss Gulch.

Remy Chandler was actually…

What is he?

The word was suddenly there, and there was no doubting it was right.

Angel.

But she’d never seen an angel so…

Scary.

She was going to try to speak to him when something happened to stop her. The thing in the sky-that swirling, whirlpool thing-it was getting bigger.

And she thought that it might be trying to swallow the world.

The thing in the sky screamed and swirled in all its fury, bringing darkness as it grew, blotting out the sun.

And with the darkness there came shadow.

More and more shadows.

It was not hard for Remy to look away from the girl. The look of fear in her eyes was enough to dissuade him as he turned his gaze to something not as troubling: the rupture that had been created between two realities. The pull of the maelstrom was getting stronger, the hole tearing larger with the passing minutes. He could hear panic in the streets below, imagining the horrors that might be emerging from the darkness spawned by Deacon’s return to his world of birth.

But it was not only the people on the streets who faced danger from the shadows.

A beast of black flowed out from beneath a section of rubble, hungry for the taste of angel. Surprised by the attack, Remy fell backward to the ground as the shadow monster pounced on him. Its claws were like ice, sinking into the exposed flesh of his arms. He saw from the right corner of his vision the hobgoblin coming to his aid, leaving Ashley alone.

“No,” he cried out, attempting to heave the thrashing animal from atop him. “I’ve got this… Don’t leave her side.”

The goblin warrior obliged him, backing away to stand before his charge, as Remy attempted to thwart this latest attack on him from the realm of shadows.

And if something was not done about the opening in the sky above, it would be far from the last.

He got the flat of his forearm beneath the slathering animal’s throat, holding its snapping, black jaws at bay, and was forcing it from him when there came an explosion of gunfire, and its head temporarily transformed into a Rorschach pattern before rolling off of him to the ground, where its mass was swallowed up by yet another bottomless pool of darkness.

Remy jumped to his feet in time to see Francis and Angus coming across the wreckage of the rooftop toward him.

The passage above their heads had grown larger still, expanding across the sky, the shadow realm now pouring into this reality.

“You know that isn’t good, right?” Angus said to him, pointing up into the sky. Francis and the sorcerer had now joined the hobgoblin and Ashley.

“Is there anything you can do?” Remy asked the sorcerer, hoping for a quick fix but already knowing the answer.

“I’ve got nothing,” Angus said grimly over the sound of the shrieking anomaly in the sky above.

Remy peered up into the eye of the unnatural storm, shielding his vision from the flying dust and debris, and looked into the heart of darkness.

He felt a stirring at the center of his being, the reality of what he was-where he had come from-roused to act.

He was the embodiment of God’s light-which drove away the darkness-and he knew what he must do.

As if sensing the realization he had come to, the center of the vortex grew suddenly larger. With an ear-piercing cry like a living thing, the whorl of the gyre became faster.