The exquisite violence of the immolation was, however, nothing to Ozryel—not any longer. He yearned for more personal destruction. He longed to violate the order, and in doing so, achieve mastery over it.
As Lot’s family fled, his wife turned back and gazed into God’s face, ever changing, impossibly radiant. Brighter than the sun, it burned everything around her and turned her into a pillar of white, crystalline ashes.
The explosion transformed the sand within a five-mile radius of the valley into pure glass. And over it the archangels walked on, their mission accomplished, ordered to return to the ether. Their time as men on earth was at an end.
Ozryel felt the warm smooth glass beneath his soles and felt the sun upon his face and felt an evil impulse rising within him. With the flimsiest of excuses, he lured Michael away from Gabriel, leading him up a rocky bluff, where he cajoled Michael into spreading his silver wings and feeling the heat of the sun upon them. Thus aroused, Ozryel could not control his impulses any longer and fell upon his brother with extraordinary strength, tearing open the archangel’s throat and drinking his luminous, silvery blood.
The sensation was beyond belief. Transcendent perversion. Gabriel came upon him in the throes of violent ecstasy, Ozryel’s brilliant wings open to their full expanse, and was appalled. The order was to return immediately, but Ozryel, still in the grip of mad lust, refused and tried to turn Gabriel away from God.
Let us be Him, here on earth. Let us become gods and walk among these men and let them worship us. Have you not tasted the power? Does it not command you?
But Gabriel held fast, summoning Raphael, who arrived in human form on an arrow of light. The beam paralyzed Ozryel, fixing him to the earth he so loved. He was held between two rivers. The very rivers that fed the canals in Sadum. God’s vengeance was swift: the archangels were ordered to rend their brother to pieces and scatter his limbs around the material world.
Ozryel was torn asunder, into seven pieces, his legs, arms, and wings cast to distant corners of the earth, buried deep, until only his head and throat remained. As Ozryel’s mind and mouth were most offensive to God, this seventh piece was flung far into the ocean, submerged many leagues deep. Buried in the darkest silt and blackest sand at the bottom. No one could ever touch the remains. No one could remove them. There they would stay until the day of judgment at the end of days when all life on earth would be called forth before the Creator.
But, through the ages, tendrils of blood seeped out of the interred pieces and gave birth to new entities. The Ancients. Silver, the closest substance to the blood they drank, would forever have an ill effect on them. The sun, the closest thing to God’s face on earth, would always purge them and burn them away, and as in their very origin, they would remain trapped between moving bodies of water and could never cross them unassisted.
They would know no love and could breed only by taking life. Never giving it. And, should the pestilence of their blood ever spread without control, their demise would come from the famine of their kind.
Columbia University
MR. QUINLAN SAW the different glyphs and the coordinates that signaled the location of the internments.
All the sites of origin.
Hastily, he wrote them down. They corresponded perfectly to the sites the Born had visited, gathering the dusty remains of the Ancients. Most of them had a nuclear plant built above them and had been sabotaged by the Stoneheart Group. The Master had of course prepared this coup very carefully.
But the seventh site, the most important of them all, appeared as a dark spot on the page. A negative form in the northeastern Atlantic Ocean. With it, two words in Latin: Oscura. Aeterna.
Another, odd shape was visible in the watermark.
A falling star.
The Master had sent helicopters. They had seen them from the windows of their cars on the slow drive south, back to Manhattan. They crossed the Harlem River from Marble Hill, staying off the parkways, abandoning their vehicles near Grant’s Tomb and then making their way through the steady night rain like regular citizens, slipping onto the abandoned campus of Columbia University.
While the others went below to regroup, Gus crossed Low Plaza to Buell Hall and rode the service dumbwaiter to the roof. He had his coop up there, for the messenger pigeons.
His “Jersey Express” was back, squatting underneath the perch gutter Gus had fashioned.
“You’re a good boy, Harry,” said Gus as he unfurled the message, scrawled in red pen on a strip of notebook paper. Gus immediately recognized Creem’s all-capitals handwriting, as well as his former rival’s habit of crossing out his O’s like null signs.
HEY MEX.
BAD HERE—ALWAYS HUNGRY. MIGHT CøøK
BIRD WHEN IT FLY BACK.
GøT YR MESSAGE ABøUT DETøNATøR. GøT IDEA
4 U. GIMME YR LøCATIøN AND PUT øUT SøME
DAMN FøøD. CREEM CøMIN 2 TøWN. SET MEET.
Gus ate the note and found the carpenter’s pencil he stowed with the corn feed and shreds of paper. He wrote back to Creem, okaying the meet, giving him a surface address on the edge of campus. He didn’t like Creem, and he didn’t trust him, but the fat Colombian was running the black market in Jersey, and maybe, just maybe, he could come through for them.
Nora was exhausted but could not rest. She cried for long bouts. Shuddering, howling, her abs hurting from the intense sobbing.
And when silence finally came she kept running her palm over her bare head, her scalp tingling. In a way, she thought, her old life, her old self—the one that had been born that night in the kitchen, the one birthed out of tears—was now gone. Born to tears, died by tears.