The Damned Holies (The Fallen Wars 1)

Chapter One

Angels, those damned angels. The thought made me smile because it was, in fact, true. The angels, all of them, are no longer accepted in Heaven.

       Ever since the Fall, they have purged humanity. They fight to control, to kill, and to torture. They revel in the glory of the horror they created themselves. They have destroyed cities, massacred millions, and made rivers run red with blood for days after only because… They want to and they can. I suspected it’s to get revenge on God. They’re immortal, impossibly beautiful, and devastatingly glorious. The angels are cruel, inhumane, selfish, have no sense of compassion, or guilt. It makes them the ultimate war machines because they can’t be destroyed.

       There are eight kinds angels and two angels per hierarch. With only sixteen, it seems like it shouldn’t be very hard for billions of humans to conquer only sixteen beings, but the angels can’t die. They are impossibly fast; being able to escape detection from the human eye. They have endless strength; being able to rip a person in two, tearing their spine apart, without any effort at all. They can also teleport, which seems impossible, but really... With the proven existence of angels, who cares? The angels are skilled in everything; especially war. Angels are invincible; a nuclear bomb could be dropped on them and they would walk away without a scratch.

       Believe me, it’s been tried. I’m standing in the ruins of that city right now.

       Angels know how to win this war and the only reason they haven’t already is because they’re enjoying themselves with the humans, like an infinite game of cat and mouse. Humanity has captured two angels, which I found out from my last raid at the United States’ secret base in the middle of a jungle in Puerto Rico. I don’t know which angels; that information wasn’t kept there. I don’t even know where they’re being held. I know what the humans are doing with them though and if I have any sort of conscience, I know I have to stop it. Humans draw out their blood and test it, trying to find out how to destroy them. That’s the truth, but the small fish in the humans’ governments are told that it’s to find cures for diseases like cancer. The high ranking humans also inject the blood themselves because it’s like steroids, but better. It makes them faster, stronger, and smarter for a day or two. I’m just glad the effects don’t last.

       Where do I fit into this? Well, I’m not one of the angels and I’m not a human either. I’m a hybrid of the two, what’s called a Nephilim in mythology, but I know I’m the only one ever born.

       Being related to the damned gives you special attributes; I’m fast, smart and strong. If the angels are better than humans, so am I. I’m stronger than the strongest human by approximately five times even though I’m a woman. I’m faster than a cheetah and my legs blur together when I run. I’m also smarter because I know things my father knows and has learned over his existence by watching over humans. I know things I wish I didn’t, like how to take out a human heart and have it beat in my hand. Along with the regrets, I also know how to battle. I’m an expert on archery, sword fighting, throwing knives, guns, and all the various styles of fighting like judo. I’m skilled in anything you can think of. It’s very useful knowledge in the world today.

       I can also see auras; humans hardly have anything, only a faint glow that I could barely see at all. Angels were different; they shone gold. I had a feeling that angels could see auras better than I could. I usually didn’t even pay attention to auras because I could only see them if I concentrated extremely hard.

I hiked my bag higher up on my shoulders and continued walking through the wreckage of Ann Arbor, Michigan. I might be on the campus of the old university, but it was impossible to tell when all the buildings are crumbled, decaying, and blackened. Burned remnants of the infamous Angel Warning posters could be found everywhere. To me, it had some kind of sick and twisted irony; the government warning people of the angels, but they were the ones who nuked a city full of innocents, not the angels. Occasionally, I’d find remains of bodies killed in the blast that took place eighteen years ago. I saw mothers clutching their babies, fathers protecting their families, and lovers holding each other. I passed an elementary school forty-five minutes ago, where I found whole classrooms where the bodies of children were still huddled under their desks. Some of them were impaled with wood, others’ skulls were smashed by cement blocks, but all of them wouldn’t have made it anyways. Nuclear explosions are devastating. It makes me sick that humans chose to forget this incident and never cared enough to bury the bodies.