Chapters (81)
Our feet crunch over broken concrete as we dart between the cars and debris. The angels were not pleased about the attack in the middle of their party, and they left the scene the way a child would leave a Lego town after a tantrum.
There are bodies lying in the street and they’re all human. I get the sick feeling that the attack didn’t do as much damage to the angels as we had initially thought. Where are the angel bodies?
I glance over at Dee-Dum and see from his eyes that he’s wondering the same thing. We pause close enough to see what’s going on.
The old aerie is just a pile of broken boulders and bent rebar. The steel rods that used to support the high-rise hotel now stand broken and exposed like bloodstained bones.
I expected the aerie to be a mountain of rubble. Instead, the rubble is spread everywhere.
The place is swarming with angels.
Winged bodies lie haphazardly in the wreckage while some are arranged in a row on the asphalt. Angels dig up enormous boulders and toss them away from what was once the aerie. A few of them drag angel bodies and line them up on the road.
My heart is racing so hard I swear I have to swallow to keep it from galloping out of my mouth.
A warrior with spotted wings walks out of one of the nearby buildings with a bucket in each hand, sloshing water with every step. He kicks the nearest body.
The supposedly dead angel groans and starts to move.
The warrior tosses water onto the bodies in the street. They were wet from the drizzle anyway but now they’re soaked.
As soon as the bodies get splashed, they begin to move.
8
“WHAT THE—” says Sanjay, too startled to remember to be quiet.
A couple of the angels lying on the asphalt immediately resurrect and vigorously shake the drops out of their hair like dogs. The others groan and move sluggishly as if the morning alarm went off sooner than expected.
Some of them are clearly shot up with bullets. Their wounds have ugly entry points and even uglier exit points that look like raw hamburger flowers.
The warrior with spotted wings grabs his other bucket and tosses the water onto the rest of the “bodies.” He also kicks a few of the wounded still lying on the asphalt.
“Get up, maggots! What do you think this is? Naptime? You’re an embarrassment.”
Apparently, Sanjay’s not the only one who forgot to be quiet because one of the angels grabs a chunk of broken concrete and throws it at a car the way someone might throw a stone at a rat. And just like rats, two of our men scamper out of the way as it smashes into the car that they were hiding behind.