DEMONS OF EDEN SERIES - UPON THIS ROCK - Chapter 10

I had drifted asleep leaned against Nick’s shoulder when a jarring sensation woke me with a sense of deep panic. Mithra had been saying something … a warning.

{{My enemies have arrived, Tesorina. Fear not, I am here for you.}}

Nick woke up and wiped slobber away from his lip. He peered at me through half-lidded eyes. “What’s wrong?”

“Mithra says they’re coming for us … his enemies.”

“You mean another swat team?”

{{No. I sense the manipulations of a conjurer in the aether.}}

I had no idea what the hell he was talking about so I gave Nick the abbreviated version. “Not exactly. Someone else is coming.”

Nick was wide awake now. Alarm streaked through his aura. But there was a hint of excitement there too. “You think it’s aliens?”

“Don’t you see how serious this is? People want to kill us. Police want to extradite us on murder charges. I doubt either Mithra or Urvashi can protect us from the shitstorm we’re in.”

I tried to still my shaking hands as the sound of approaching footsteps sent spikes of anxiety up and down my spine. Nick and I locked eyes and his freaked out gaze echoed the way I felt.

A uniformed officer accompanied a man in a black cassock. They spoke in low murmurs of Italian, and I didn’t understand a word of it except when the officer nodded in respect and said, “Monsignor.”

Someone from the Vatican.

The man turned to look through the bars at me and the strangest thing happened. His face moved, but didn’t move. He looked at me but someone else … another him, like a shadow person, looked towards Nick. I caught a sense of two entities inhabiting the same body, two souls.

The double souls centered their attention on me with a casual smile that didn’t match their calculating eyes. “We have found the Cardo.” He spoke at me, but not to me – a Bluetooth device or radio.

The Monsignor gestured to the officer and the man stepped forward to unlock the barred door to our cell. I studied the flare of his two auras. Two souls intertwined around each other. A double aura flickering together, moving as one.

Nick looked confused. I pushed him back against the wall as hot power warmed my hands. “Stay back!” My threat was directed to the Monsignor, but Nick listened too. Nick pressed himself against the wall and nodded that he understood serious shit was going down.

I had no idea who or what this Monsignor was, but Mithra knew and didn’t like him at all.

Suddenly Mithra flooded my mind and body, taking control. {{Allow me, Tesorina. I am your defender.}}

The man with two souls stepped past the Polizia official into the open door of our cell. “I am Bishop Accorso, and I come to liberate you. I can take you from this confinement and guide you on the path to enlightenment. Join me, we have much to discuss.” The words coming from his mouth were not his. Something inside the Bishop spoke to me, but Mithra wouldn’t let me answer.

The Bishop held out his hand, an invitation.

Mithra’s warm power merged with mine, prickling my skin with the need to be released. {{Impressive conjurings, Galos. Leave us now and you may live to vex me another day. Continue to interfere and I promise destruction for you and yours.}}

The Bishop’s calm demeanor held and a slight smile curled the edges of his lips. “I can teach you how to master your abilities, Ashley Rowan. You are bound in Mithra’s grip. I can show you how to regain control and embrace your destiny as the Cardo.” He’d ignored Mithra and suddenly I wasn’t so afraid of the Bishop.

{{Galos twists truth with lies. The Bishop is bound to him, simply a tool, incapable of resisting. You are free, Tesorina. You are cherished, and guarded by all that I am. You are a power unto your own. Together, none can stand against us.}}

“No matter what he has told you, no matter his promises, know he holds secrets. He serves his own purpose, possibly to your detriment. To the detriment of your world.”

I found freedom to speak as Mithra eased off control over me. “Who do you serve and why should I listen to you?”

“I am Galos, and I represent the interests of many who wish to visit your world as we once did centuries ago, to join with humanity and share the knowledge of our sciences, to help humanity navigate the pitfalls of a technological society. Your world is fast reaching the natural limitations of population growth. Humanity faces grave decisions for the future and we would counsel your leaders with the wisdom of our centuries, wisdom learned at great cost from our mistakes. More importantly, I knew your mother once … before the madness consumed her.”

{{He attacks your most vulnerable places, seeking to disarm and confuse. Focus on me and our mission. His kind are ravagers of worlds and they will never pass to Eden. They are not worthy.}}

Trying to ignore Mithra’s speeches and whisperings in my head, I honed in on the one detail that mattered most to me. “What does my mother have to do with this?”

“Did Mithra explain how your mother lost her mind?”

I couldn’t speak. It never occurred to me Mithra might have been involved in my mother’s schizophrenic frenzies. She’d been locked away for years, labeled as a dangerous schizo whack job. A day after my twentieth birthday she hung herself in her room.

A thudding noise brought me out of dark, painful memories and back to the moment. I tasted smoke and burnt wiring, like all the electrical was overloading. The overhead lights fizzled and popped. Though I could still see the late afternoon sun through a window across the hall, the place was a lot darker without lighting.

A flash of alarm hit the Bishop’s face and his double aura began to separate. His body turned away towards the door to my cell, as if he’d heard something. The other soul stood facing me and I saw him more clearly, Galos. He was draped in robes and wore something around his forearms, an armor similar to the wrappings I’d seen on Mithra. He looked older than the forty-something Bishop, maybe in his fifties, and his gaze stared through me, as if he was looking at Mithra rather than me.

A wispy tether connected the two auras, and the further the Bishop moved out the door, the more Galos was pulled along with him. Suddenly the two auras slapped back together and the Bishop rattled off orders in Italian. The officer reacted immediately and ran down the hallway shouting into his radio.

Polizia officers taking commands from a Bishop? That didn’t make sense.

Five more men in black cassocks rushed into the hall and surrounded the Bishop. Synchronized as one, they all pulled little black pistols from inside their jackets and pointed their weapons towards the commotion coming from the door at the end of the hallway.

“Guess they forgot about brotherly love.” Nick’s face morphed between excitement and trepidation. “We’re getting jacked by priests.”

I knew nothing of Italian, but I understood fear and anticipation when I saw it. The Bishop and his men expected trouble. “Ucciderli!” The Bishop pulled a little black gun and his men took a protective formation around him. He leveled his pistol at Nick and looked at me with sympathy. “I do not wish to harm innocents, but I will be forced to take his life if you do not cooperate. Come with me your friend may live.”

Nick straightened his shoulders. “I’m not letting them take you, and we had a deal, Ash. You can’t leave me behind!” Nick looked offended at the suggestion. “Whatever’s going down, I’m in.”

Idiot. He had a free pass out of this insanity, and he wouldn’t take it. After almost getting killed, slammed on the pavement by cops, arrested and interrogated, he still wouldn’t go. Nick was either very brave, or very foolish. I suspected the latter.

Muffled sounds of screaming came from the door at the end of the hall. A moment later the steel door burst open with a violent slam and the priests took aim at whatever was on the other side. With priests blocking the view, I leaned forward to better see through the bars of our cell. Something covered in blacked moved in a blur. A caught a strange sensation of blood flowing, a coppery taste in my mouth. Blood lust, gallons upon gallons of blood. A black-clad man with flashing metallic blades flitted up the side wall, as though gravity didn’t apply to him. Shots fired and priests shouted. The man flashed up, down, side to side. He closed the distance with blurred speed and inhuman agility. He moved so fast, his feet seemed to never touch the ground. He slashed through the first priest in a split second.

Blood and gore smeared my face. The Bishop snagged my arm and pulled me out into the hallway, trying to exit through the other end of the hall. A second later, a whirring blade severed the Bishop’s hand from his wrist. The disembodied hand remained latched onto my arm until I shook it off.

“Oh that’s so gross!” I almost gagged.

Bullets zinged past me and I felt a flush of heat all over my skin. The black-clad assassin slipped past me and hacked through the Bishop. The clergyman’s gun went off and the assassin flicked sideways to evade. The bullet sparked off my skin in a bright flash. I felt it then, the humming shield of Mithra’s power wrapped around my body. As promised, Mithra was there for me. Always protecting me.

“Get down!” Nick pulled me back into the cell and onto the floor as the remaining priests fired shots every which way trying to hit a lightning fast target that never stopped darting side to side.

Shouts and cries of alarm echoed through the hall and our open cell as the wet noise of blades slashed and hacked through flesh. I looked in Nick’s eyes, and saw his fear. Mithra might be able to protect me, but Nick was vulnerable.

“Get up and move. The Polizia will be here any moment.” Urvashi? Since when…

Snuggled in Nick’s embrace on the concrete floor, I looked up at Urvashi’s blood splattered face. She was barefoot, and had slipped in so silently, I never heard her enter the hall. At her side stood the tall, slim assassin covered in black body armor from head to toe and a tight fitted ski mask over his face. He carried a blood-drenched sword in each hand. I got the same strange sensation, of a creature whose life revolved around blood, a thing that drank the blood of its victims endlessly. There could never be enough blood to satisfy him.

It was a man, but not a human.

“He’s with you?”

Urvashi pulled me off Nick. “Yes, Aaron is with me. I told you I had reinforcements here in Rome.” She turned to the black mask and flicked her head down the hallway. “Get Renault and meet me on the roof. He’s down the corridor.”

“Stop calling me Aaron, my name is Richard. And I didn’t sign up for dog-sitting duty.”

Her eyes crinkled in amusement. “Please, just this once. Next time we’ll leave him here for a few days, teach him a lesson.”

Aaron snickered and nodded. “I’ve had that lesson already.” He took off down the hall in a flash, a black blur of death.

Urvashi led Nick and I through the graveyard of dead priests and I tried hard not to look at them. There are some things you can never unsee, and I knew this massacre would haunt me for a very long time. When we reached the Bishop, Mithra forced me to open my eyes and confirm that both souls had evacuated the dead body lying in a pool of blood.