Leviathan

  Leviathan

  Thomas E. Sneigoski

  Eighteen-year-old Aaron is on the run from the Powers that killed his foster parents and took his younger brother, Steven. With his dog, Gabriel, and Camael, a former Power, he is drawn north to a small town in Maine. Here Aaron, who still hasn't accepted his newfound heritage, finds comfort in the isolated, tight-knit community. But when Camael and Gabriel go missing, and their landlady suddenly attacks Aaron, he is forced to learn more about the War in Heaven and the many Powers that are fighting for dominance...of humankind.

  Leviathan

  The Fallen series, book 2

  Thomas E. Sniegoski

  PROLOGUE

  Amidst the south Serbian Mountains, nestled within the gorge of the Black River, sat the Crna Reka Monastery. The wind howled piteously, like the sad wails of a mother mourning the loss of her child, as it blew across the high rocks and sparse vegetation surrounding the holy hermitage.

  It was a lonely place, a place for reflection and absolution. The church itself was constructed within a large cave during the thirteenth century—an homage to the Archangel Michael. The hermit monks soon built their cells around the church, and a small drawbridge was erected over the Black River. By a great blessing of God, the river disappeared underground just before the monastery, and then reappeared several hundred meters later, sparing the monastery the deafening roar of the water’s noise.

  The repenter knelt upon a worn, wicker mat in a cold, empty room of the monastery in the rocks, and listened to the prayers of the world. No matter the time, be it day or night, someone, somewhere, searched for the aid or guidance of the Divine. A woman in Prague prayed for the soul of her recently departed mother, a man in Glasgow for the continued health of his wife stricken with cancer. A farmer in Fort Wayne asked for relief from a fearsome drought, and a truck driver parked alongside a road in Scottsdale begged for the strength to live his life another day. So many voices, a cacophony of cries for help—it made his head spin.

  He tried to lend them all a slight bit of his own strength, and asked the Creator to listen to their pleas. Does the Lord of Lords hear me? he wondered. The penitent hoped so. Though others would have him believe that the Holy Father had stopped listening to him a long time ago, it did not prevent him from speaking on behalf of those who prayed—a conduit to Heaven.

  Eyes tightly closed, ears filled with the sounds of benediction, the kneeling man smiled. A six-year old named Kiley prayed with the passion of a saint for a brand-new bike on her birthday. Had he ever prayed with such fervor for anything? The answer was obvious—it was the reason he continued to wander the planet, searching out the most sacred places, hoping to quell the burning turmoil at the core of his being.

  The sinner sought forgiveness—forgiveness for the evil he had wrought.

  The sound of tiny claws scrabbling across the stone floor wrested him from his concentration, and he opened his eyes. A mouse stood on its hindquarters, nose twitching eagerly toward him.

  “Well, hello there,” the penitent said softly, his voice filled with affection for the gray-furred rodent. He and the mouse had become good friends since his arrival at the monastery six months before. And in exchange for bits of bread and cheese, the little animal kept him abreast of events outside the hermitage.

  From within the long sleeves of his robe, the repenter produced a crust of bread from the previous night’s supper and offered it to the small creature. “And how are you today?” he asked in a language only it would understand.

  “Others here,” the mouse replied in a high-pitched squeak as it took the bread in its front paws.

  For the last two months he had sensed something growing in the ether, building steadily over the past few days. Something with the potential for great danger—and yet also wondrous. He had his suspicions, but did not want to get his hopes up only to have them dashed to pieces again.

  “Others like you,” the mouse finished, nervously gnawing on the piece of bread.

  Suddenly the repenter was glad that he had sent the Crna Reka brothers to town for supplies this day. If what the mouse was telling him was true, he did not wish to risk the well-being of anyone else. The brothers had been quite gracious in allowing him into their place of quiet solitude, and he did not want to see any of them suffer for their charity.

  He listened, focusing on the sounds of the monastery around him: the muffled roar of the Black River flowing beneath the structure; the creak of the bridge outside, jostled by the winds blowing into the gorge from the mountains above; the rumble of thunder.

  No, not thunder at all, something far more ominous.

  The penitent picked the mouse up from the floor and placed it in his palm as he stood. “And where exactly did you see these others?” he asked.

  “Outside,” it answered, continuing its nibbling. “In sky. Outside in sky.”

  It was then that the repenter began to feel their presence. They were all around him. The floor of the monastery began to shake, as if in the clutches of an angry giant. Rock, dust, and wood fell from the ceiling, and the walls began to crumble. He clutched the tiny life-form to his breast to protect it from the falling debris. An explosion, filled with sound and fury, rocked the monastery, and the walls before him fell away, sliding into the Black River Gorge to reveal the Serbian Mountains, and those who awaited him.

  They hovered there, at least twenty in number, their mighty wings beating the air—the sound like the racing heartbeat of the wilderness valley surrounding them—and in their hands they held weapons of fire.

  The repenter stepped back from the jagged edge of a yawning precipice and held the trembling mouse closer. He did not take his eyes from them. He was not afraid. Some bowed their heads as his gaze fell upon them, remembering a bygone time when he had commanded their respect—but that was long, long ago.

  “Lift your heads,” ordered an angry voice in the language of messengers. Their numbers began to part, and he who led them moved forward. “The time for this one to be shown reverence passed when the first seeds of the Great War were sown.”

  The penitent was familiar with he who spoke: a wrathful angel in the Choir called Powers. His name was Verchiel, and he bore the scars of one who had recently fought a fierce battle. The repenter wondered why they had not healed, and almost asked the angel—but decided this was not the time.

  “We have come for you, son of the morning,” Verchiel said, pointing his sword that burned like the heart of an inferno.

  With those words, the angels of the Powers glided closer, their weapons raised for conflict.

  “Your corrupting time upon God’s world has ended,” Verchiel said with a gleam in his deep, dark eyes of solid night.

  “You’ll receive no fight from me,” the repenter replied, looking from the fearsome Powers drawing inexorably closer to the mouse still held in his hand against his chest. “Just keep your voices down,” he continued as he ran a finger along the soft, downy fur of the trembling rodent’s head. “You’re scaring the mouse.”

  “Take him!” Verchiel cried in a voice that hinted of madness, scars hot and red against his pale flesh.

  And they flew at him.

  The repenter did as he imagined he must. No weapons of fire sprang from his palms, no powerful wings unfurled to carry him away. He slipped the fragile creature that had become his friend inside the folds of his simple robes, and let himself be taken.

  Shackles of a golden metal not found on this world, their surface etched in an angelic spell of suppression, were slapped roughly upon his wrists, and he felt himself immediately sapped of strength by their inherent magic. Some of the Powers, but not all, clawed at him, striking him, beating him with their wings—even though he offered no resistance. The penitent could under
stand their resentment and did nothing to halt their abuse.

  “Enough!” Verchiel bellowed, and the angelic soldiers stepped away from the repenter’s prone form on what remained of the room’s floor.

  The leader of the Powers approached, and the prisoner looked up into his cold, merciless gaze. “So angry,” he whispered as he studied the expression of cruelty burned upon the angelic commander’s face. “So filled with blind hatred. I’ve seen that look before. It’s very familiar to me.”

  Verchiel motioned for his men to lift the repenter from the ground, and they did just that—but he continued to examine the leader’s troubling features.

  “I used to see it every time I saw my reflection,” he said as he was borne aloft by the angels of the Powers.

  His words struck a sensitive chord. Verchiel’s expression changed to one of unbridled fury, and he hinged toward the repenter, a new weapon of flame taking shape. Will it be a sword to cleave my skull in two—or maybe a battle-ax to separate my head from my shoulders? he wondered. The weapon became a mace, and the angel swung with a force that would shatter mountains. It connected with the side of the prisoner’s head, and an explosion, very much like the birth of a galaxy, blossomed behind his eyes.

  As he slipped into the void, he was accompanied by the fading sounds of the world he was leaving behind, the murmurs of prayer, the moan of the mountain winds, the pounding wings of vengeful angels, and the rapid-fire beating of a frightened mouse’s heart.

  Then, for a time, all was blissfully silent.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Aaron Corbet accelerated to seventy on I-95 heading north. He turned up the volume on the cassette player and casually glanced to the right to see the angel Camael wincing as if in pain.

  “What’s wrong?” Aaron asked. “Do you sense something? What is it?”

  The angel shook his head, his expression wrinkling with distaste. “The noise,” he said, pointing a slender finger at the dashboard cassette player. “It brings tears to my eyes.”

  Aaron smiled. “Oh, you like it?”

  “No,” the angel grumbled as he shook his head. “It pains me.”

  “It’s the Dave Matthews Band!” Aaron exclaimed, genuinely stunned.

  “I don’t care whose band it is,” the angel growled, moving agitatedly about in the passenger seat. “It makes my eyes water.”

  Annoyed, Aaron hit the eject button, and the cassette slowly emerged with a soft, mechanical whir. “There,” he said, gripping the steering wheel with both hands. “Is that better?”

  The radio had come on, and the sound of Top 40 pop filled the vehicle. One of the popular boy bands—he could never tell them apart—was singing about lost love. He glanced again at Camael to see that the angel was still making a face.

  “What’s wrong now? I turned off my music.”

  “And I am appreciative,” the angel warrior said as he gazed out the window at the scenery whipping past. “But I find all of your so-called music to be extremely discordant. It offends my senses.”

  Gabriel reared up in the back and stuck his yellow-white snout between the front seats. “I like the song about Tasty Chow,” the dog said.

  Happy to be talking about anything that can end up in his stomach, Aaron thought as he squeezed the steering wheel in both hands.

  “How does that song go, Aaron?” the Labrador retriever asked. “I’ve forgotten.”

  “I don’t know, Gabriel,” he said, becoming more irritated. “That’s not even a real song—it’s a dog food jingle, a commercial.”

  “I don’t care,” the dog said indignantly. “I like that song a lot—and the commercial is good too. It’s got kids and puppies, and they play on swings and run and jump and then the puppies eat Tasty Chow…”

  Gabriel stopped mid sentence as Aaron reached out to shut off the radio, plunging the car into silence. Great, he thought as he drove, just what I needed. Without the distraction of music, his wandering mind had another opportunity to examine how completely insane his life had become.

  Just over two weeks ago, on his eighteenth birthday, Aaron learned he was something called a Nephilim—the child of a human mother and an angel. Aaron never knew his biological parents, having been in foster care all his life. So when he began to exhibit rather unique abilities, like being able to speak and understand foreign languages—human and animal—he thought that maybe he was losing his mind.

  Which was exactly what he was going to do if he didn’t stop thinking about this stuff. He glanced over at the powerfully built man—no, angel—sitting in the passenger seat beside him. “So what kind of music do you like?” he asked to break the silence.

  Camael had once been the leader of an army—a Choir of angels, the Powers, whose purpose it was to eliminate all things offensive to God. After Lucifer’s defeat in the Great War in Heaven, many of his followers fled to Earth. Barred from Heaven, these angels began a life upon the world of man, some even taking wives and having children. It was the job of the Powers to destroy these defectors and their abominable offspring, the Nephilim.

  “You are speaking to one who has heard the symphony of Creation,” the angel said in a condescending tone. “How can the sounds produced by the likes of your primitive species even compare?”

  As Aaron knew, on one of his many missions to eradicate the enemies of Heaven, Camael had been made privy to a prophecy—a prophecy that described a creature, both human and angel, that would reestablish a bond between the fallen angels on Earth and God. This being—a Nephilim—would forgive these angels their sins and allow their return to Heaven. After so much violence and death, Camael thought this was truly a great thing, but his opinion was not shared by his second-in-command, a nasty piece of work that went by the name of Verchiel.

  “So you don’t like any of it?” Aaron asked, dumbfounded by the angel’s broad dismissal of the entire musical spectrum. “You don’t like classical or jazz—or rock or country? None of it? Everything gives you a headache?”

  The angel looked at him, eyes burning with intensity. “I haven’t had the time to sample all forms of your music,” he said. “As you are aware, I have been rather busy.”

  Camael left the Powers to follow the prophecy. For thousands of years he wandered the planet, attempting to save the lives of Nephilim—hoping that each might be the one of which the prophecy foretold. Now led by Verchiel, the Powers would do anything to eliminate the blight of half-breeds from God’s world, making the prophecy but an ancient memory.

  “But you’ve been here forever,” Aaron said with a disbelieving grin. “I don’t mean to be a pain in the ass, but…”

  “That’s exactly what you are, boy,” Camael said, looking back out the side window. “You are the One—as well as a pain in the ass.”

  So besides being a Nephilim, which was bad enough, Aaron Corbet was also the subject of the prophecy. It wasn’t something he had even been aware of—until the Powers, under Verchiel’s command, attempted to kill him. The attacks resulted in the deaths of his psychiatrist, his foster parents and a fallen angel by the name of Zeke—who had helped him finally tap into his angelic abilities and save himself.

  “I’m sorry,” Aaron said, slowing down as a red sports car pulled up alongside him on the two-lane road, then sped up to pass. “It’s just that you come on all holier-than-thou because you’re an angel and everything—when in fact you really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Though I no longer associate with their Choir, I am of the Powers,” Camael said, “one of the first created by God, and it is my right to have an opinion that disagrees with yours.”

  The abilities called to life with Zeke’s urgings saved not only Aaron’s life, but also the life of his dog, Gabriel. When the Labrador was struck by a car and mortally injured, Aaron called upon his latent powers and healed the dog, as a result changing Gabriel into something more than just a dog.

  “You can’t have a real opinion unless you’ve actually listened to the stuff. It�
�s like saying you don’t like broccoli when you’ve never even tasted it,” he said, frustrated by the angel’s attitude.

  “I like broccoli,” Gabriel said suddenly. “I wish I had some right now. All that talk about Tasty Chow has made me very hungry.”

  Aaron glanced at the digital clock on the dashboard. It was a little before noon. They had been on the road since the crack of dawn, and it had been a long time since breakfast. Maybe we should pull over and get something to eat, he thought. Then he remembered Stevie and immediately felt guilty. Who knew what was happening to his foster brother?

  When the Powers attacked his home, the angels took his seven-year-old foster brother. Stevie was autistic, and according to Camael, angelic beings often used the handicapped as servants because of their unique sensitivity to the supernatural. This was the main reason they were on the road, to rescue Stevie—that and to prevent the Powers from hurting anyone else Aaron might care about.

  Aaron was distracted by the sound of something spattering and looked down near the emergency break to see saliva pooling from Gabriel’s mouth. “Gabriel,” he scolded, reaching back to push the dog into his seat, “you’re drooling!”

  “I told you I was hungry,” the Lab said, leaning back. “I can’t stop thinking about that Tasty Chow commercial.”

  Aaron looked over at Camael, who was silent as he gazed stoically out the window. “So what do you think?” he asked. “I’m getting kind of hungry myself. Should we stop and get some lunch?”

  “It makes no difference to me,” the angel said, not looking at him. “I have no need of food.”

  Aaron chuckled. “You know, that’s right,” he said, the realization sinking home. “I’ve never seen you eat.”

  “I love to eat,” said Gabriel from the back.

  “How is that possible?” Aaron asked, finding himself interested in yet another aspect of the alien life-form known as angel. “Everything has to eat to survive—or is this some bizarre kind of supernatural nonsense that I won’t understand?”