ARCHANGEL EVOLUTION
Book Three of the
Evolution Trilogy
David Estes
Published by David Estes at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 David Estes
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
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The Evolution Trilogy by David Estes:
Book One—Angel Evolution
Book Two—Demon Evolution
Book Three—Archangel Evolution
This book is dedicated to my readers,
past, present, and future.
You are the reason I write.
PART I
“Everyone’s running from something
But we don’t know when it’s coming
So we keep running and running gotta
Now I’m looking up the bible tryna find a loophole
Yeah I’m living for revival dying for a new soul
Now there’s no light to guide me on my way home
Now there’s no time to shine my rusty halo
Now I’m running for the light in the tunnel but it’s just the train
Yeah I’m looking for the right type of pleasure but all I find is pain
Now there’s no light to guide me on my way home
Now there’s no time to shine my rusty halo”
The Script- “Rusty Halo”
From the album The Script (2008)
Chapter One
Shining liquid streamed down her arm. Blood. Angel blood. But not hers.
Someone’s.
She cradled his head in her arms. She was glowing. He was bleeding. Gabriel was bleeding. It seemed as if his entire body was covered in the gleaming milk. She needed to find the wound…to heal him. Fast. He was dying—that much she knew.
He was wearing a white tunic. Strange, she thought. It could be replaced. She tore it off him, revealing the horror beneath.
There was a softball-sized hole in his chest. From the hole streamed the glowing blood. In the hole was his beating heart. Thud, thud. Thud, thud. Thud……..thud. The beating was slowing—he was dying. His heart—not red or pink, but white—had been attacked: two round puncture wounds marred its fleshy surface. The marks were familiar somehow.
She thrust her hand in the open wound, clutched the heart, and whispered words long forgotten. Her hand glowed as energy was transferred to him. She felt the heart squeeze out a final beat, heard the sucking of air as his lungs took a final gasping breath, and then nothing. Nothing. She had failed him.
What Evil? she thought. What Evil would do such a thing to her? Would take the love of her life? Would take her reason for living, her water, her air? Wanting revenge, she whirled around, seeking the Evil. It found her first.
The enormous ink-black snake latched onto her chest with vice-like jaws, twisting, squeezing, tearing, ripping. Intent on one thing: piercing her heart. Like it had Gabriel’s.
At first she struggled, attempting to pry it from her skin, but eventually she realized the futility of her efforts and succumbed to its desires. After all, she had nothing left to live for. Because he was dead, too.
The snake torqued its head back violently and she felt her chest open. She collapsed to the cold, hard ground. Rearing above her, the serpent reveled in its victory. It held something in its mouth; the thing was dripping bright, white liquid. It was her heart—also white, like Gabriel’s; an angel’s heart. The snake’s face transformed from a scaly serpent to something humanlike. A face she had hoped never to see again. A face she both hated and feared equally.
Dionysus laughed, and in doing so dropped her heart, allowing gravity to carry it towards her face.
Taylor screamed. She stopped when a hand was thrust in front of her eyes, catching the heart in mid-fall. Lolling her head to the side, she gasped when she saw the piercing eyes that met hers. He was alive.
Chapter Two
Dionysus’s eyes sparked open as he was released from the trance. He had entered the girl’s dream only to monger fear. For fun, really. While it was within his power to infiltrate the dreams of angels, demons, and humans alike, he was unable to cause any real damage by this method. The damage would have to be done in person. He was glad about that.
He longed to close his hands around her filthy neck, to ring the life out of her. His hands almost itched at the thought. While revenge would surely be sweet, it was not his main goal. If only he could be so foolish, so impulsive. In another time, maybe he would have charged off in a fit of rage, seeking to satiate his growing bloodlust. But not now. Now he was a man of self-control, mature and calculated in his meticulous planning and scheming. The leader of his people. Loved and respected.
For a week he had meditated on what had happened, taking his meals while sitting cross-legged on the floor. At times he dozed, and his dreams were filled with flashbacks of the girl ruining everything: her unexpected and seemingly fortuitous appearance on the Warrior’s Plateau, her willingness to bargain for Gabriel and his family, and her miraculous transformation into an angel.
Well, more than an angel, really.
When he wasn’t sleeping, he was thinking. For the last decade he had focused on carrying out The Plan. Despite its genius, The Plan was a simple concept: destroy the demons, enslave the humans, and harvest their bodies.
Ten years ago while travelling the earth, Dionysus had learned that he could inhabit the body of any human he chose. This was valuable because despite the many superhuman capabilities that angels had been endowed with, immortality was not one of them. Unfortunately, Dionysus could not outlive his body. His only option was to replace it.
Now he was in his early fifties, but had the body of someone in their early thirties. He fondly remembered the day he had added decades to his life expectancy:
He had just finished a day of futile and frantic experimenting. The eight expended human corpses were heaped in a pile. There was no messy cleanup—not one drop of blood had been shed. All he had left to do was burn the bodies.
The last subject was chained to the wall, cowering, like a child afraid of the boogeyman. Dionysus would have almost pitied him if he hadn’t hated him so much. The twenty-five-year-old was not bad looking, handsome even by human standards, but he was still a human, and therefore, pathetic, weak.
Despite his frustrations, Dionysus had managed to meditate for a few minutes, blocking out the sobbing whimpering of the last test rat. Concentrating hard, he remembered each failed experiment and tried to pinpoint what had gone wrong.
In each case, Dionysus had attempted to harness the aura, or the inner light, of each human subject and convert the aura into energy to power his own abilities. They were the humans with the largest auras he could find, and yet they broke under his influence; shattered beyond repair, their internal organs had imploded upon themselves, causing instant death. Locking on to their auras, his powers had increased by twenty to thirty percent, a small gain that was a far cry from what he had hoped for.
During each failed experiment there was a point where something…strange had happened. At the point where he could feel his own powers beginning to magnify, he could also sense that the human was dying. He felt a
pull from within him. Not a physical pull, but a pull that could only be described as spiritual. It was as if his soul, if he even had one, was trying to escape his body. He could sense this pull, feel it, and it scared him. So he simply sucked even more of the humans’ auras from them, killing them, and releasing the strange pull.
As he dwelled on the phenomenon, he wondered if the pull was really dangerous. Perhaps it was just a part of the process required to harness the human aura. Or perhaps it would kill him. Either way, it was a risk he might have to take. All great scientists were forced to take risks to further their knowledge. Maybe this was his great risk. His kite in the lightning storm, so to speak.
Dionysus had boldly delved into the final subject, the one with the largest aura, and began harvesting the power within him. The man had screamed—oh how he had screamed; his shrill cry was deliciously full of fear and pain and weakness. At the point of no return, the point where he felt the pull on his very being—his soul?—he had allowed the process to continue, had allowed the subject to live, albeit in great pain.
It was then that he had an out of body experience.
He could see his body, glowing, glowing, and then going dark like an extinguished candle. While his spirit, or something like it, hovered in the air, his body crumpled to the floor; what was full of life became suddenly lifeless.
He turned his attention to the subject, who was still screaming, screaming, and whose aura was glowing from within him. And then they were one. Him and the subject. He was the subject. The subject was not himself—not anymore. The subject was dead, but not. The subject’s soul had died or been replaced or been hidden, or something else entirely. Whatever the case, the subject was no longer present in the body, but the body remained alive, governed by Dionysus. He controlled the limbs, the bones, the speech. He had inhabited the body.
At first he was fearful that he had inadvertently become human again. That by some trick of the gods, he had devolved back into the pitiful existence of his predecessors. His fear was short-lived, however, as he had quickly realized that all of his powers, knowledge, and strength were still intact, they were merely housed in a new body. A younger body. One with more years separating it from a death caused by old age.
That’s when he knew he had discovered the figurative fountain of youth. He could live forever. In fact, all angels could.
Dionysus smiled at the fond memory of his discovery. It had changed everything. He had switched bodies once more to retest his theory, carefully selecting a stunningly handsome Italian man for the job. The same man he now looked at every day in the mirror. He was the Italian man, or the Italian man was him, the semantics didn’t really matter. Of course, he no longer looked Italian, because for some strange reason his hair had changed from a deep black to white blond when he had taken over the body, a trick of the transition.
Only a handful of other angels within his innermost circle knew the key to immortality, but none had chosen to follow the path yet. But they would. When their bodies began failing them, they would choose life. When the time was right, when the demons had been eradicated, he would tell the rest of the angel population his secret, and they would choose life too, helping him to enslave all of mankind.
Unfortunately, the last week had been a major step backwards for The Plan. When that damn girl, Taylor, transformed into an angel, she destroyed most of the Archangel Council—only Johanna, Sarah, and Percy remained. She had also eliminated his ability to use her aura to destroy the demons. When she was a human he could harness her aura to wield a weapon so powerful that the demons wouldn’t stand a chance. However, as an angel, her inner light had changed—for some reason angels couldn’t access each other’s auras—rendering her useless.
The whole mess was an unexpected development, and had sent Dionysus into a fit of rage, the likes of which hadn’t been seen in many years. His tantrum didn’t last long, however, and now he had a new idea—one that was given to him by Taylor. Not intentionally, of course, but even an inadvertent gift was valuable.
If she could evolve, why couldn’t he? Sure, he had evolved once before, from demon to angel, and his ancestors had once evolved from human to demon, but Taylor had been the first to evolve from human directly to angel. Perhaps he had been underestimating the evolutionary forces at play. Perhaps he had underestimated himself. Perhaps he could learn from the girl. It couldn’t hurt to try, he thought. But how?
Out of the corner of his eye he spotted movement, subtle and small. Despite the tiny web-crawler’s positioning in the far upper corner of the room, Dionysus could see the spider clearly. It had already designed and built an intricately detailed trap, beautiful in its simplicity—a web. Under normal circumstances, the spider would be motionless, waiting for his invisible net to capture dinner. In this case, however, the silky contraption had already done the deed—a fly was stuck in the corner, frantically buzzing and twitching in a fruitless effort to escape. The spider moved closer. Not only did Dionysus marvel at the beautiful appearance of nature in his fortress, but he also wondered at how a spider could have penetrated his innermost sanctuary. And even more incredible was the appearance of the fly. He would have to fire his housekeeper. But first, the spider and its web of perfection had given him an idea, one that excited him.
Assuming the success of his idea—and being an optimist he always assumed success—he would have all the firepower he needed to destroy Taylor, murder Gabriel, and eradicate the demons and their allies, like flies pitifully trapped in a web, waiting to be eaten alive.
But first he needed to rebuild the Archangel Council, and he knew the perfect recruits.
The spider crawled onto the fly.
Chapter Three
Taylor Kingston waited for him to arrive. She needed to talk to him. He was already an hour late.
She was wearing ripped jeans, flip-flops, a t-shirt, and her usual nine rings. Her straight, brown hair was unkempt—she hadn’t bothered to comb it. As usual, she wore no makeup, although since her transformation her skin had become flawless—just another benefit of angelhood.
As she sat on the lawn waiting, she was subconsciously aware of the demons protecting her. One was on the roof of a nearby building, another high in the uppermost branches of a tree, and two more in a parked car. There were likely countless others in the vicinity as well, but as of yet she hadn’t spotted them. She almost felt like yelling C’mon out, guys, we can all sit and wait together! but she held her tongue.
She gazed at the inside of her wrist—her new tattoo still looked fresh, having been inked only a week earlier. A pair of basic angel wings decorated her arm. They were a reminder of what she had become, and also what she had come from. Despite the increased strength of her skin, the tattoo-artist eventually got the job done, but only after breaking two needles and severely damaging the third. She had paid him extra for his efforts. Taylor’s dad had shrugged when he learned about the new tattoo—after the second one he had come to expect it.
Taylor’s new tattoo was the first to not feature the black snake. The deadly obsidian serpent that had plagued Taylor’s nightmares her entire life was not important to her anymore—a mere shadow of the great tormentor from her past. Her first tattoo—on the back of her shoulder—was the largest and displayed only the snake; it had been etched while she was still in high school, as a symbol of her waning fear of the nightmarish creature. The second tattoo—on her ankle—showed the snake strung up on a sword, dead and gone. She had had it inked during her first semester at college after Gabriel had entered her dreams and slain the snake in its most fearsome form yet: a monstrous serpent bigger than any demon python or anaconda from some cheesy horror movie.
Taylor smiled as she ran her fingers over the freshly stained wings. She was an angel! A week earlier, she was a human girl, and now she had crazy-impossible-beautiful wings growing inside her back. Granted, she had been dating an angel and fighting alongside the demons to protect the earth, but she was still only a human, before. But so
mehow she had evolved like others had before her. She was still waiting on the test results, which would hopefully shed some light on the remarkable transformation she had undergone.
Naturally, her hand slid down to the second tattoo, on her ankle. Her thoughts reverted to her most recent dream. Awakening from the dream, she hadn’t been scared or upset; rather, she had been surprised. It had been months since she had dreamed of the black serpent. The last time was when Gabriel had entered her dream and plunged his sword into its evil black heart. She wanted to know why the slithering Evil had made such a sudden reappearance. That’s why she needed to talk to Gabriel, among other reasons.
Still bored, Taylor began playing with a lock of her hair, twisting and twirling it on her finger, braiding it and pulling it apart, flipping it in the air. It was the lock she always played with when she was bored. The white one. Taylor wasn’t blonde all over; rather, she had acquired a single lock of white-blond hair when she had been changed. At first it had annoyed her, but now it was growing on her.
Taylor had only been back at college for a week, but was already growing tired of the daily routine: get up, go to class, eat lunch, more class, dinner, study, bed. After all she had seen and been a part of in the last few months, she wasn’t ready for routine just yet.
She considered phoning Gabriel, but something stopped her. Most of her life she had relied on her instincts—her “good gut” as her mother used to call it before she was killed by a drunk driver. One of the few times Taylor had ignored her gut was when she had trusted Gabriel implicitly, and had almost died because of it. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.