Blink {Featured}

Chapter Forty

'I need to curse you Gabriel,' Death said as he appeared in front of the Archangel.

Gabriel gave a twisted look at Death's impassive face. 'Curse me?'

Death nodded. 'Only you are strong enough to carry this curse, you and you alone are strong enough to get close to the beast. It is only you my friend who is honourable enough to die for Him.'

Gabriel looked up to the sky and sighed. 'Thy will,' he said, then kneeled.

Death grasped Gabriel's head between his hands. 'Your curse is to become mortal. On death your mortality will transfer to your slayer and so the curse will travel on. I am Anubis, the last of my kind and I curse you Gabriel, never again to walk the Halls of heaven as an angel.' He kissed Gabriel on the forehead and disappeared.

Gabriel struggled to his feet in the ash, mortality weighing heavy on him. With a roar that shook the heavens he ran at Belial, sword pointed forward.

Death watched from above as a car swerved round mounds of rubble, cutting a path to York Station. As an old man coughed into a tissue, glanced at the fallen angel seated beside him briefly, and adjusted his glasses. As a man dodged Belial's sword and cursed. And he watched an angel use his last breath to shout as he charged the demon who sliced him open and bled away his life. Oh Gabriel, so noble.

A myriad of Johns charged Belial, but some fell in the Dark John's wake. Death counted twenty-three, no four. No, twenty-eight, if you counted robotic arm John and the three Johns already dead behind the Dark One. 'Shit, John,' he mumbled standing atop the building.

John, the first John--or the last, if he got things right--leapt out of reach of Belial's sword just as it slammed into the rubble. Two stray bullets ripped open John's chest in the next breath and Death cringed. Had the kiss worked?

Pale, John looked at the bullet holes, felt his own blood with shaking fingers.

'Come one, come on.' Death frowned. Behind John the Dark One froze, his hand still stretched to blast another collapsed John to smithereens. Could John ever become such a dick? Well, the evidence was there. Death hoped John could fix this before it was too late.

A spattering of bullet shards poured from John's wounds and the blood disappeared as the wounds closed. It had worked. 'My gift, Johnny,' Death mumbled smiling, then turned his attention back on Semila as John picked up his sword.

The old man with Semila, there was something about him. Death couldn't place who exactly he was. The man was not what he seemed, but was he one of the enemy? A rogue angel? A demon? The car screeched to a stop at York Station's collapsed roof, and Semila tumbled from the door mumbling thanks. From a distance Death could see the sallow green of her skin. Wild ride, even for her, the untameable fallen angel. Huh.

Voices, thousands of them, called to Death with their dying moans, screams cut short, and he distorted, pulled in many directions at once. Death could not miss a human's passing, and now thousands died in minutes, stretching him thinner than he'd been stretched since the Second World War. With a sigh, he gave in. Time to do his duty, but he was tired. Oh so tired. In a flicker of air he was gone. He had done what he could to help, but the world's fate rested in John and Semila's hands now.

'God, I know I'm not supposed to be doing this, but I...I pray. That you will help John and Semila.'

#

Semila stumbled up cracked stairs, stepped around mounds of rubble. The darkness grew deeper. No people walked the destroyed station. A light flicked and tinged, then buzzed to a stop, another patch of darkness. The sound echoed. She walked past the entrance halls into the station proper and gasped at the great domed skyline, the glass shattered. A great ball of rock the size of a mutant wrecking ball trailed smoke into the sky through the shattered panes on the domed roof, a train crushed beneath it steaming. Flames danced further into the murk behind the wrecking ball, trains ablaze with the fire poured from heaven.