Chương 201: Finishing The Fence (01/06/2016)

DATE: Wednesday, January 6, 2016 LOCATION: Low Earth Orbit | The Los Angeles Basin, CA LOCAL TIME: 11: 15 PM PST I didn't fall. The Draven overwrote my gravity, hurling my mass down through the stratosphere in a silent, frictionless streak. Target One. A Hollywood producer pacing in a heavily shielded panic room in Bel Air, screaming into a burner phone. The night air inside his vault violently collapsed with a concussive crack. The scent of ozone flooded the sterile room.

I materialized directly behind him, stepping out of the micro-vacuum. He spun around, the phone slipping from his fingers as he looked up at the towering, black-suited nightmare from human folklore. I didn't give him time to scream. I drove the heel of my palm upward, shattering his septum and collapsing his windpipe.

"Retether," I commanded. The panic room vanished. The sickening rush of the upward launch flattened my lungs, only to instantly reverse. Target Fourteen. A socialite floating in an infinity pool in Malibu. The atmospheric pop sounded like a suppressed gunshot over the roar of the surf. I materialized standing on the edge of the water. She turned, her eyes widening in abject horror at the silhouette blocking out the moon.

I stepped into the pool, my leather-gloved hand clamping over her face, pushing her down into the chlorinated water until the thrashing stopped.

"Retether." Target Forty-Seven. A tech executive sitting in the back of a moving Maybach on the 405 freeway. I materialized in the empty seat beside him. The sudden displacement of air blew out the luxury sedan's reinforced windows. Before his brain could even process the explosive decompression, I snapped his neck, gripped his collar, and phased back out.

"Retether." It wasn't a battle. It was a rhythmic, mathematical slaughter. Drop. Kill. Delete. Ascend. I became a localized natural disaster. Heavily armed security details patrolling perimeter walls never saw me, because I didn't cross the perimeter. I dropped directly into locked master bedrooms, private screening theaters, and subterranean wine cellars. I used whatever was in the room. A marble bookend. A heavy crystal decanter. A fireplace poker.

When there was nothing, the Operator's bare hands executed the kinetic equations with brutal, flawless efficiency. Every time I materialized, they knew. The moment they saw the wide-brimmed hat and the black suit, the arrogant elite of the Nephilim coven reverted to terrified, trembling animals. They recognized the myth. They realized that the fairy tale they had whispered about in the dark was real, and he had finally come to collect.

Eighty-two, Lamech counted, his voice humming with dark satisfaction as I threw a hedge-fund manager off a penthouse balcony in downtown L. A. Target Ninety-One wasn't quite as seamless. The cartel liaison's bodyguard was paranoid, managing to squeeze off a wild 9mm round before I crushed his windpipe. The kinetic armor absorbed the impact, but a sharp, bruising sting radiated across my ribs. The friction was temporary, merely a brief, stinging reminder of the physical plane before I snapped his boss's neck.

One hundred and four, he whispered, as I held a weeping intelligence director against the wall of his study until his pulse faded into nothing. My muscles burned. My knuckles were split and aching, my breathing heavy, but the Operator's stamina was limitless. I was a machine fueled by the unyielding rage for a dead sister. Target One Hundred and Forty-Two. The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

The concussive pop of displaced air echoed across the Santa Monica Mountains. Target One Hundred and Forty-Two. The head of the coven and the owner of the mansion where they performed the Open Mouth ceremony on Amy. The heat in the study was suffocating. The orange glow of the burning hills outside bled through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the heavily fortified estate. I appeared in the Study's open window. The man by the fireplace didn't look like a stranger. He looked like a nightmare I had buried in 1987.

He was older now, the rumpled Armani replaced by a bespoke midnight-blue suit, his hair a distinguished silver, but the eyes were the same. Those bleary, predatory eyes that had once cornered a twelve-year-old girl against a bar in West Hollywood. Martin Trent. He stood with a crystal tumbler in his hand, watching the flames with the same detached fascination I had shown him three decades ago. He didn't look like a victim. He looked like a man who had finally stopped running.

"The loggerhead shrike," Martin said, his voice a smooth, melodic baritone that carried the weight of centuries.

"I've spent thirty years thinking about that bird, Chad. I spent thirty years wondering how an eleven-year-old boy knew exactly how it felt to impale his prey on the thorns."

"I told you I owned a lot of barbed wire in this town, Martin," I said, my voice the flat, dead frequency of the Operator.

"Tonight, I'm just here to finish the fence." Martin turned, a cold, patronizing smile touching his lips. He took a slow sip of his drink, completely unbothered by the massacre I had just carried out.

"You mortals are so desperately attached to the present moment," Martin mused.

"In the courts of Louis XV, they knew me as the Count of St. Germain. Before that, I sat in the Hanging Gardens of Babylon as they bloomed, and I stood at the foot of Golgotha just to see what a dying deity looked like." He swirled the amber liquid, the firelight catching the heavy, flawless diamond rings on his fingers—a subtle testament to centuries of hoarded wealth and alchemical parlor tricks.

"I have mastered the alchemy of time, Chad. Transmuting base lead into gold was a child's distraction; the real art is transmuting human souls into a useable currency. You think you've won because you deleted my coven?" Martin gestured lazily to the burning room.

"One hundred and forty-one sycophants sent back to Sheol. They were merely a fleeting investment. An alchemical reagent. This is a slight setback, but I have infinite time to regather a new flock."

"The lesson is over, Martin," I said, stepping over a burning fragment of the ceiling.

"You're the last one." Martin laughed, a soft, chilling sound.

"You think you're a rebel? You're a glitch. Your current vessel will eventually wither and die, and when your soul cycles back to the queue, we will find your next incarnate. We will strip away your Operator and make you into a Thrall—just a hollow, obedient puppet like the one you thought you freed. The Unbound do not care about your shrike metaphors or your exhausting human sentimentality." I launched. I was a blurred streak of black and shadow.

The Operator's math was perfect—a strike intended to cave in his sternum and anchor the zero-day exploit directly into the stolen microtubule lattice of the producer's body. But the air violently curdled. A wall of pure, vibrating sound—the acoustic resonance—slammed into me. I was hurled backward, my boots skidding across the polished hardwood as the house groaned. Martin Trent set his glass down on a table that was already starting to char. He reached into his jacket and pulled out an obsidian biometric key.

The fire reflected off its polished, alien surface.

"Enjoy the ashes, Chad. I'm taking my leave to the Pentagon to stand with our masters. Let's see how the scion of Cain handles the future lifetimes of servitude that await you." He pressed the key. The air behind Martin Trent folded inward, and he was gone as the study exploded.

"Retether." The burning study vanished. The sickening vertical pull slammed me back into the airlock of The Draven. The heavy steel doors hissed shut, sealing out the void as local gravity slammed my boots into the deck. I stood in the center of the airlock, my chest heaving. The black suit was ruined, speckled with the biological exhaust of a hundred and forty-one brutal executions. My leather gloves were slick and heavy with blood.

I pulled them off, the wet material peeling from my skin with a sickening sound, and dropped them onto the cold metal grating. I looked out the viewport. Below me, the sprawling grid of Los Angeles was waking up. The eastern horizon was bleeding a pale, bruised purple into the sky. Eight hours had passed. All but Martin Trent were eliminated. I walked out of the airlock and sank into the leather of the command cradle, the bone-deep exhaustion finally crashing over me.

The quiet, ambient hum of the Draven's atmospheric recyclers felt deafening after the concussive violence of the night.

"JAY," I breathed, resting my head against the headrest.

"The board is clear, Chad," JAY reported quietly.

"One hundred and forty-one targets eliminated. The coven is eradicated." I sat in the dim blue light of the cockpit, my raw, bruised knuckles resting on the armrests. The adrenaline was finally bleeding out of my system, leaving behind a cold, hyper-focused clarity. I stared at my reflection in the dark glass of the primary flight display. Lamech was looking back at me from the monitor, the featureless Hat Man silhouette perfectly still.