APOCANGELICA Wild Beasts

Chapter 23

 "Efreniel of the Black Centuria" shouted a voice from behind, interrupting them.

Efreniel and Ada turned around. An angel had just landed on the window ledge of the bare room of the tower chosen as a temporary shelter for Ada.

"Damn!" thought Efreniel. "They arrived sooner than I had expected."

"Jeensiel" he greeted calmly and smiling, approaching him in a nonchalance manner.

"You killed Samarniel and kidnapped the Forgetter human!" accused the other angel, closing his wings and jumping down from the window ledge.

"Samarniel? Killed? I don't know what you're talking about! As for the human I found her here wandering in a daze... but what happened?" he asked while continuing to move closer to him.

"You can't fool me! Someone must have killed him and around here I've only seen you!"

"But how can you think that I, an agent of the Light like yourself, could have killed another angel and especially an agent of light himself: we are all on the same side! Jeensiel."

"Are you trying to make me believe that you don't know anything about all this?" asked Jeensiel suspiciously.

"Absolutely nothing, you have to believe me. And the Senate? Does he know you're all here?" urged Efreniel who had now come before the other angel.

"Why are you speaking in the plural form? How do you know it's not only Samarniel and I?... It's not that you know nothing; you know enough and...." but he was unable to finish the accusations: in the hands of Efreniel appeared in a flash a serrated blade knife that he stabbed in the angel's chest. Jeensiel slumped to the ground lifeless with his chest pierced at the level of the heart. Streams of warm golden blood, the blood of angels, flowed from the huge wound spilling on the cold stone floor.

Ada stared at the scene in horror. "But how can you be so cold-blooded?" she protested. "Don't tell me that you had no other choice like you said a few hours ago when it came to the other angel?!"

"I told you, it is necessary for the accomplishment of the mission. If I had any other option I would have avoided all this bloodshed!"

Ada looked at him without saying anything still shocked by Eddy's brutality.

"Now take the stairs and go into the room below this one. I will stay here. The aura of Jeensiel has been extinguished and soon someone else will come to investigate."

Ada obeyed mechanically, as if in a trance. She went down three flights of stairs. She arrived at the door of the room under the one she was in before. She pushed open the door of raw wood and closed it behind her, leaning against it and breathing with difficulty.

Only a few seconds had passed when she heard a furious flapping of wings coming from outside. She ran to the window and impulsively looked upwards. Something white, plumage and snow-white feathers of a wing entered fluttering from the window: an angel had landed in the room above. She stood at the window with her heart pounding in her chest and a lump in her throat, terribly worried about the fate of Eddy. A moment of silence; then raised voices, screams and insults, confusion and sounds of a struggle, finally silence again.

A body was thrown out the window. Could it be Eddy's? The wings of the angel, like a heavy white cloak, wrapped the lifeless body. The neck was bent at an unnatural angle; most definitely the spine was broken.

The body reached the pinnacle of the trajectory and began the free fall. Ada saw him fall in slow motion: he twirled, breaking free of the embrace of the wings which began to beat against each other, in a saggy way. He passed in front of her wide open eyes. "Eddy?" she whispered. She calmed down when she saw the silver mimetic. Drops of molten gold, which protruded from a laceration in his neck, accompanied the fall of the angel like a thick rain. Ada stopped following the fall, and instead turned and slid to the ground, with her back against the cold stone of the wall. How could her Eddy be capable of such ferocity?! Within minutes he had killed twice with unprecedented ruthlessness. Where was the light-hearted and tender boy she had known in Pangea and that had convinced her to abandon everything to follow him in that unknown and terrifying land?