Petra literally lit up the dark woods outside the Wold’s forward-operating-base as she landed, scattering the dark shadows with the luminescent shimmer that radiated from somewhere deep within. Her thick, gleaming wings folded neatly upon her back and disappeared into the thin, gossamer silk of her tunic.
Blaze, who had been stationed outside and had been drifting in and out of conscious thought, straightened up at once as he caught sight of the sudden absence of darkness.
‘Where is Jinn?’ Petra enquired, her musical bell of a voice chiming through the soft, hushed sounds of the early evening. She beamed at Blaze as his yellow eyes raked slowly and deliberately over the sheer silk that draped her frame. Her long golden hair was loose around her, crowned with a ring of tiny daisies crafted from pearls, their delicate petals surrounding a centre of sparkling topaz and twisted together with stalks carved directly from web-like emerald slivers. The moon skittered out from behind a swift moving cloud and as the clear light fell upon her, Petra appeared fairylike, ethereal in the gloom that she put to shame with her luminosity. Blaze was in awe of the vision before him, his hardened features were slack.
‘Jinn.’ Blaze repeated the name, clearly incapable of comprehension.
‘Your Commander?’ she prompted, turning her face aside slightly to conceal the amusement that caught at one corner of her pretty mouth.
‘Ah. Inside, he’s inside.’
‘I will speak with him. I have something of great importance to his cause, to our cause.’ There was such an imposing urgency to her tone that Blaze didn’t pause for a moment.
‘Go straight ahead, he’s on the first floor.’ He stepped away from the doorway to clear the way for Petra.
With a slow smile that rose like the sun, soft at first but then dazzling in its brilliance, Petra slipped around Blaze and left him blinking in her wake.
‘Ah-ha, your guard said you would be here,’ she smiled as her cool, slim hands cupped Jinn’s eyes, even though he must have seen her coming – he never looked up. ‘Guess who?’
‘Petra, how positively delightful that you’re here.’
‘Where’s the girl?’ she asked. Even blinded by Petra’s hands Jinn could hear the petulant pout in her voice.
‘Dead.’
‘Yes, Uriel said she was,’ she said, unconcerned as she leaned over his expansive shoulder to peer at the document he had been reading.
‘Uriel?’ Jinn frowned darkly and ripped her hands away from his face, whirling immediately to face her. Although he was sat at his desk there was hardly any difference in height between them. ‘If you had to ask Uriel there was no need to ask me, was there?’
‘Well, no,’ Petra straightened up and glanced around the large, airy room. Jinn’s wide desk stood in the centre bathed by the clear moonlight that fell through the three windows that ran from floor to ceiling along one wall. The windows were so wide that there was hardly any space between each and they were open to the night, the glass panes that had been replaced a few years previously had been thrown open to let the cool air soak in. The black leather chair Jinn sat in looked comfortable, his dark blue cloak that singled him out as Commander was thrown over the back of it as he worked by candle light. ‘I just thought I’d ask you.’ Petra shrugged her statuesque shoulders, smooth and perfect as she turned with interest to inspect the otherwise unfurnished room. She twirled, her thin silken tunic circled her perfect legs and clung to every delicate curve of her body as she sat in the straight-backed chair on the other side of Jinn’s desk. ‘I was worried about you for a moment, we all were.’
‘There was a reason I was spending so much time here in the Wolds, the safety of our kind is at stake here,’ he justified with another dark scowl as his eyes flitted to the bound sheaves she had placed on top of his work.
‘Yes, Uriel explained. Michael wanted more information on what was happening here. I feel bad for teasing you now. Oh, but it’s so good to see you. I’ve brought you Athena. It seems as though you are to start your guardianship again.’ Petra leaned across the vast desk to gently caress Jinn’s warm cheek with one hand.
Both angels looked up at the heavy knock that echoed through the room.
‘Enter.’ Jinn was brusque as he swept up the document Petra had placed on his desk. He grinned, dark eyes sparkling as Mike was led by the upper arm into the room to be left standing beside the radiant Petra, who eyed the red-haired boy with open curiosity and thinly disguised contempt. Mike’s wrists had been secured behind his back and a purple bruise flared across his pale cheeks, blackening one eye. Blood had dried on his chin, frozen in the act of flowing from his lower lip.
‘Where’s Eutopia?’ he growled, fiercely, ignoring the beautiful woman who sat beside him.
Jinn laughed at his tone and Petra looked amused.
‘She is no longer your concern.’
‘She will be my concern until the day I die. She’s like family to me, what’ve you done with her?’
Jinn leant forward across his desk, wanting to catch the exact moment in Mike’s clear, grey eyes that he crushed his soul.
‘She is dead.’
There was a moment that Jinn thought Mike would fall as he swayed on his feet unsteadily. Petra must have had the same inkling as she stood quickly, wrinkling her nose in disgust as she came to stand beside Jinn. Mike’s eyes closed for a few short seconds.
‘I must say I’m impressed,’ said Jinn. ‘I had expected, hoped even, to see you fall to your knees in anguish like the old woman.’
‘You’ve told Phoibe and Horace?’ The horror was bright in Mike’s stormy eyes, swirling with the emptiness of grief that stabbed like a dazzling sword into the darkness. He was broken, fractured to beyond the point of repair. But Jinn thought he could shatter even further.
‘I had to. It would be cruel to leave them waiting hopefully for her to return. Horace has certainly aged since the last time I saw him.’ Petra leaned down to encircle Jinn with her beautiful arms, the back of her hand stroking his smooth, never-aging cheek as she gave Mike a little smile. She was enjoying the show, the crackle of hoarse emotion in Mike’s voice gave her a thrill.
‘I won’t let Eutopia die for nothing, so you may as well kill me too,’ Mike promised, lowly. Jinn laughed at the uneasiness on the boy’s face and Petra was alert to his mirth, straightening up to glance curiously at him. Her fingertips left his cheek to play with the short tips of his dark hair.
‘Utopia,’ she muttered more to herself than to Jinn, snorting softly. ‘No place.’
‘Oh no, I won’t kill you.’ Jinn promised, softly.
‘Mike!’ came a lilting whimper that carried through the vast room, a shivering leaf of a sound above the soft scuffling noise that could suddenly be heard as the door opened again. Blaze entered, holding Mike’s mother, Theresa, before him, his large hand gripping firmly at the nape of her skinny neck and thrusting her forward, forcing her to stumble over the smoothly polished stone floor. ‘Oh, Mike, please, what’s going on?’
Mike closed his eyes and hung his head, composing himself, before he looked up to take in the vision of his bird-like mother, thin and trembling as she twisted her hands with worry before her, looking like a fishing lure baiting a hook at the end of Blaze’s arm. Of course, that’s exactly what she was.
‘So,’ Jinn began, reasonably, sitting back in his comfortable leather chair and crossing his long legs so that one booted foot rested on his knee and his large hands relaxed on the carved wooden arms of his seat. ‘What’s it to be? I don’t do this very often, I have to admit I’m a bit of a control freak, but the powers in your hands Mike. You can decide what happens next. Are you going to condemn your mother here to a very slow, drawn out death? Believe me, Blaze is an absolute master of his art.’ Blaze grinned at this praise, his cold eyes glowed gold in the warm candle light and he looked over at Petra, who was stood with one motionless hand on Jinn’s broad shoulder now. ‘He can create vivid and excruciating pain in such a way that the mind is too numb to shut down and is helpless to do anything but register the torture, bit by agonising bit. And then, just as all of the energy seeps from the body, burnt up by the effort it takes to cope, he’ll pull back enough to let the hurt echo in every fibre of every cell, before continuing on, and on, and on.’ Jinn leant forwards across the desk as Mike’s shaking knees finally gave way and he collapsed in a heap upon the straight-backed chair. He waited for a moment.
‘Or,’ Jinn shrugged, as if the point was irrelevant, ‘you let go of this totally misguided sense of heroic self-destruction. Up to you.’
The Bunker had been built towards the end of the End, supposedly creating a disaster proof habitat of six foot thick, steel enforced, concreate walls far below the surface of the topsoil that would protect the inhabitants from almost anything. Except an angelic attack. It had at one point been an entirely self-sufficient space, with crops grown under artificial light and water pumped direct from a fresh spring that had been carefully mapped out and tapped into. But as the months turned into years under the terrifying incessant attack of the merciless beings, the electricity ran out – the main supply destroyed gradually, country to continent. And the water became tainted, poisoned by hand or as a by-product of the chemical weapons the humans had developed in an attempt to terminate their enemy, no one was ever really sure. They were all too busy dying slowly to ever give it much thought.
‘Do you ever wonder if we’ve got it wrong?’ Jonathon asked Jinn quietly, lolloping alongside him in his slow and unconcerned way as they followed behind the figures of Petra and Blaze as they twisted further and further underground, tracing the same steps that many feet had trodden before. The thick concreate on either side of the narrow, winding stairway was cold and damp, tinged green with mould.
‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought that,’ Jinn said, glancing with a little curiosity at the thinner angel beside him who’s soft brown hair, the same colour as his warm eyes, fell messily around his ears and lent him a boyish charm.
‘What are we fighting for though?’
Jinn pulled him up short and his thick arm pressed heavily against Jonathon’s chest, crushing him against the wall.
‘Our place on earth. Our very existence,’ Jinn growled lowly, so low in fact that Petra and Blaze carried on out of sight oblivious to the altercation taking place further up the stairs. ‘Can’t you see that we can’t both survive here?’
‘Why not?’ Jonathon questioned as calm and collected as if Jinn didn’t have him pinned against the wall. ‘We did it from the beginning, right up until the End. Why did things have to change so drastically between our kinds? Surely it’s possible to live together, alongside each other as we used to?’
‘These humans are intrinsically egotistical. Their personal interests began to dictate their actions and they still are, even now. They want this earth to themselves and they are plotting to take it from us. We have to take it back before it’s too late. We were promised this land, it was always going to be ours. They just got in the way.’ Jinn let go of Jonathon and turned back to continue down the narrow, winding stairs. He could hear Jonathon behind him taking a deep, slow breath before he hurried to catch up.
They entered the meeting room together to find Petra and Blaze seated at the L-shaped table, the brushed steel surface dully reflecting the glow of the many candles that stood in the centre and illuminated the room. Uriel, his black eyes fixed on Petra who was deliberately avoiding his gaze and smiling, stroked his short, auburn beard.
‘Jinn, Jonathon, welcome. As punctual as always.’ He turned his head, lazily dragging his eyes from the practically beaming Petra. ‘Where’s Adrien?’
‘Where’s Gabriel?’ Jinn countered, ‘He was meant to be heading this update.’
‘Where’s Adrien?
‘Can we please stop droning on and on in circles, this place is giving me the creeps. And it stinks like old piss.’ Petra said in an offended tone, shivering delicately and with great effect. Blaze slung his plain black cloak, trimmed with white around the edges to mark him a Watcher, around Petra’s bare shoulders before Uriel had even taken two steps towards her. Uriel whirled back to face Jinn, raising a vast red eyebrow as Jonathon slunk his lanky frame into the nearest seat.
‘Adrien is guarding the boy and his mother back at our F.O.B.’ Jinn shrugged easily, though his eyes flickered with annoyance, the flame to Uriel’s coal-black stare. The other angels glanced between the two, feeling the tension crackling like static in the air.
‘No he’s not,’ Jonathon began with a confused look up at Jinn, who was still stood darkly in the doorway as the candlelight failed to reach his vast frame. ‘I thought they were…’ He trailed off, realising all eyes were on him, and ran a hand through his thick brown hair, making it stand on end. ‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said, unconcerned as he pulled the nearest three-branch candelabra towards him.
‘Just get on with it,’ Jinn narrowed his eyes at Uriel, leaning back against the cool wall that left him out of the pool of light that spread across the table-top. He knew that in remaining standing he was causing Uriel great annoyance, who relished wielding any ounce of power above Jinn’s head like a broadsword. Now that Jinn had been reinstated as Commander, even if it was of the Wolds, it brought his rank level once more with Uriel as Commander of Hiera and he wasn’t about to sit down and let Uriel forget it.
‘Why such secrecy?’ Jinn demanded. Uriel smirked and folded his bulging arms, taking pleasure in the sense of annoyance in his voice.
‘Gabriel did intend on updating you all back at the base, but Operation Mortam is going far better than anticipated.’
‘Operation Mortam?’ Blaze asked, having never heard the term before. ‘What’s that?’
‘It’s the back-up plan Michael’s been plotting with Gabriel and Uriel,’ Jinn offered, his dark eyes fixed on the smirking fellow Commander across the small room. Uriel had opened his mouth to interrupt Jinn, but thought better of it and gestured for him to finish with one hand as the other slowly smoothed the short, auburn stubble around the raised corners of his mouth. ‘The Eliteists are finally being made use of, from what I understand, in Fairways. They’re helping our side in a way they probably didn’t know was possible until now.’
‘Ah, I was quite content for you to carry on but that’s where I will have to interrupt you, Commander,’ Uriel said, stepping up to the table and splaying his large hands out on the silver top as he leant forward to catch the soft heat-shimmer haze over Petra’s features, leaning down as if he were speaking only to her though his gravelly voice carried clearly through the room. ‘It goes much further than Fairways now. We’ve extended our hold past the old town boundaries to the Hollow and the Vale.’ Jinn was suddenly alert, taking a step into the warm glow of the candlelight that did little to alleviate the gloom.
‘But we have no Elitists that far South.’ Uriel spread his hands palm upwards as he shrugged with a grin.
‘We do now.’
‘What is Operation Mortam, though?’ Petra asked, her beautiful features framed by the cloud of her loose, golden hair capped with sparkling pearl daises that would never wilt.
‘Our researchers have been hard at work for a few years perfecting the art of transferring energy from one life force to another.’
‘How so?’ Jonathan asked, sitting up straighter in the hard metal chair on his side of the table, the warm wax that had pooled on the table top that he’d been absently dragging his finger through in a circular motion was forgotten now.
‘The Elitists were more than willing to offer themselves up to assist with our advancement. To begin with it took a while, a week or so at least, but now the Green Coats have perfected it to the point where the transference takes only a day at most. The blood must be drained slowly, you see, slow enough to ensure the life-spark remains, no matter how faint, until the very last drop has been transferred.’ Uriel explained, his black eyes bright as his cheeks flushed with excitement at the thought.
‘Transfers to what?’ Blaze asked, looking a little but puzzled.
‘Transfers into our kind, to the Angels. The blood is drained from the Elitists and either stored or injected straight into our soldiers. Without it we are not totally immune to death, as you well know. We can be killed, mortally injured. But when our life-force is combined with that of another, one that is so similar to our own in many ways, we become unstoppable.’
‘And you’ve transformed our whole army in this way?’ Blaze questioned Uriel eagerly, his tapered yellow eyes glowing almost as bright as the now animated Uriel’s.
‘Yes, and we’ve moved on to the other ranks stationed at Hiera.’
‘But surely there aren’t enough Elitists, enough volunteers to contribute to our cause, especially once they realise that their sacrifice will kill them?’ Jonathon asked.
Uriel laughed, genuinely amused.
‘I didn’t say they were all volunteers.’
‘That’s, that’s –‘ Jonathon began with a sickened tone.
‘Brilliant!’ breathed Petra, her gloriously golden eyes wide with delight as she leaned towards Uriel.
Jinn silently turned from the room and made his way back up the narrow concreate stairs, the stench of age old death assaulting his senses as the hollow echoes of Petra’s laughter followed him topside.