“You silly bitch, you’re going to kill everyone in L.A. because you’re too good to help them? How many Deadly Sins is that? Pride. Anger. Greed. Envy, too, maybe?”
Aelita turns away from me. I take a couple of steps toward her and a bullet rips into my right arm. It’s Ray, the Shut-Eye, getting back a little of his own. I look at him and he seems as surprised as anyone else that he fired. Without a verbal order, the other marshals are unsure if they should follow up.
Ray’s bullet is just a grazing shot. It ripped off a lot of skin near the deltoid. Surface shots can tear up a lot of nerves and nine times out of ten they hurt more than a killing shot. This one burns like a hot wire pressed against my arm from the shoulder to the wrist. I hate to admit it, but the pain catches me off guard. It comes quickly enough that I close my eyes reflexively when it hits. I don’t see Aelita turn to her people, but I hear her voice.
“You are the Golden Vigil. Holy Crusaders on a mission from Heaven. You have no reason or right to hesitate. Kill the Abomination.”
It’s her voice that hits me, not the threat. Something about the deep and beyond-time certainty of her tone. It’s like she’s shouting my death from the bottom of a well halfway across the galaxy and a billion miles deep. When she tells the marshals to kill me, she’s really giving the order to kill the world. She’s an angel. She’s seen stars and worlds come and go. We’re just mayflies living on this one. Maybe humans really are made in God’s image. That makes us harder to kill, but sweeter, too. Angels want revenge. Everything alive wants revenge, even if it’s simply for the affliction of existence. The sound of my death sentence and the death of everything I’ve ever known, cared about, or hated rattles and clangs in my skull, getting heavier every second as the weight of all the aeons it took to get from the Big Bang to my ears drops down on me. God went to all the trouble of creating the universe, the angels, the stars, and this world just to murder us. Alice and me and everyone else.
Even angels want revenge. Everything alive wants revenge.
The moment the thought crystallizes, Aelita wins. The solar winds and deadly vacuum freezing the empty space between the stars blows the last of Stark away. He falls into the dark. He doesn’t make a sound. He’s not surprised. He saw this moment coming. He fixes his eyes on me as he falls. That’s the last I see of him, the light reflected in his eyes as they go from white orbs to pinpoints to nothing. Then he’s gone and I’m alone.
Only the angel left in here. No humans allowed.
My eyes are still closed. The world has gone electric. I hear the rustle of fabric and the stretching of muscles and tendons as the marshals adjust their stances. Their heartbeats and breath go from fear to resignation. Ripples spread out like waves in a pond from their fingers as they increase the pressure on gun triggers. Metal shifts against lubricated metal. The muscles in their arms tighten. They’re already anticipating the explosions when the guns go off. The sound. Muzzle flash. Recoil. The pleasant reek of cordite.
I’m not angry or concerned. Time is slow and cold and it never stops. What’s going to happen will happen and nothing will stop it.
My arm burns and the heat throbs all the way down to the bone.
I hear a rattle of explosions as the marshals fire.
I’m not afraid. I see all this happening from the bottom of a well halfway across the galaxy and a billion miles deep.
The pain in my arm makes me double up. I’m burning alive.
When I open my eyes, the marshals’ bullets glide toward me in slow motion. I sweep my arm across them and my arm is made of fire. The bullets glow red, then blue, then white, and disappear like they’re made of steam. I swing my arm back and a dozen human faces gape at me. I look at my arm. It’s not burning, but it’s glowing red from the heat of the flaming Gladius in my hand. An angel’s weapon. Something Stark would never be capable of summoning, much less holding, but it’s my birthright.
The marshals don’t know what to do. They’re here for Stark, but Stark shouldn’t be able to manifest the sword. They don’t know that I’m not Stark anymore. I’d try to explain it to them, but they’re busy pulling triggers, filling the air with more slow-motion metal snowflakes. I brush them away like moths and keep moving.
I kill Ray first. He started the bullet party, so he deserves the first dance. His eyes open wide. He expects a high blow, that I’ll slice him from above, so I swing the fire blade under and up, taking off his legs. Before his torso hits the ground, I swing again and give him the downward stroke he was looking for. I take two more Vigil agents in the time it takes for a hummingbird to flap its wings. I cut each of them in half at the waist and let them collapse onto each other, the top half of each man trying to hold the other up so he won’t follow the other down. I catch the next marshal with a thrust into his gut. He’d already moved into fighting position while I was killing the first three, and when I stab him, his gun goes off by my ear. The ejected shell bounces off my temple. Before it hits the floor, I’ve pulled the blade up and out through his head. As I kill the others, each gets off one or two shots. In their confusion, most of their bullets hit each other. Ejected shells arc through the air and bounce off my cheeks and chest. The last few marshals all fire at once. The shots I can’t sidestep, I vaporize with the blade. When eleven are dead I move in to kill the last one, but when I raise the Gladius my arms stay up. She’s not like the others.
I stare at Marshal Julie for a moment and lower the burning sword to my side.
“You’re Sub Rosa,” I say.
She nods.
“We try to be like them. To have a few eyes everywhere, like them,” she says, inclining her head toward Wells and Aelita.
I look down at the gun in her hand. The steel barrel is black and cold. No trace of warmth there. She didn’t fire. When she sees that I’ve seen, she shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t hurt you. You’re one of us.”
“No. I’m not.”
That scares her, but it’s not what I intended.
“You should go now,” I tell her.
“No she shouldn’t.”
I turn and there’s Wells with a big .50 Desert Eagle pointed at my head. He gives me his Clint Eastwood stare. He’s scared to death, but disciplined enough that it doesn’t matter. He’d kill me without hesitation or regret if I let him.
He says, “If she’s a pixie spy, she can rot in prison alive and in Hell right next to you when she’s dead. You killed my people and she just stood there. Fuck both of you.”
I’m running at him with the Gladius at throat level, but Aelita is already moving to him and she’s closer. She’s as fast as I am, so while she’s a blur to others, to me she looks like a normal woman walking to a man and plucking a gun from his hand. She holds the pistol with the barrel up to indicate she isn’t going to shoot. I stop, but keep the Gladius high.