End of Days (Penryn & the End of Days 3)

Then the giant speakers screech their feedback – the loudest and most piercing feedback I’ve ever heard, even through my noise-canceling headphones. All that intense noise blasting straight into the angels’ hypersensitive ears.

The angels slam their hands against their ears. With their eyes and ears assaulted, they’re staggering in the air, neither attacking nor flying away.

The angels’ exceptional night vision and sharp hearing is working to our advantage. Their superior abilities are their weaknesses now. They can’t turn it off. The intense lights must be killing their eyes. And that noise – hell, it almost makes my ears bleed with the sharp blast.

It helps to have Silicon Valley geniuses in your crew.

Freedom fighters with rifles pop up everywhere – beside the stage, along the bridge walkways, and behind the bridge supports. Although I can’t see them, there should also be snipers settled beside each spotlight and on platforms hidden beneath the bridge.

Gunshots ring through the night.

While the angels are staggering in midair, trying to see and think enough to get away from the god-awful noise, our fighters are shooting them down into the water. After what I saw when we fought angels in the sea the other day, it’s a good bet that most of them can’t swim.

By now, the great white sharks of Northern California should have found their way to the bloody bait we cast into the bay during the show. Here, sharky, sharky . . .

The feedback from the speakers changes and begins blasting death metal music so loudly into the sky that I swear the bridge suspensions are vibrating.

The twins were in charge of the music selection.

I catch sight of them on the side of the bridge, each with an arm raised, holding up their forefingers and pinkies in a devil sign, head-banging to the beat. They’re mouthing the words to the garbled voice screaming over the intense electric guitar and drums blasting out of the speakers. They might look pretty badass if it weren’t for their hobo clown outfits.

It’s the loudest party the Bay Area has ever heard.

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Those of us on the ground crew help reload the bullets for the gunners. The goal is to try to knock the enemy out of the sky and into the shark-infested waters, but if some of them happen to fall onto the bridge, we’ll be ready for them.

I hope.

The lights turn off all together, plunging us into darkness. Doc and Sanjay insisted the lights flash to keep the angels from adjusting to the light and to continue to keep them blind. So the lights are on timers to turn off and on according to their guesses as to the angels’ ability to adjust.

Our snipers have infrared goggles to see in the dark, but there weren’t enough to go around to the ground crew. With all the death metal blasting through the air and my double-layered soundproofing, I can’t hear anything either.

We’re in the middle of a battle for our lives – blind and deaf. I freeze, desperately trying to sense something. It feels like we stand vulnerable in the dark forever.

Then the lights turn back on, blasting our eyes with their intensity. I squint, trying to see through the blinding glare.

Angels begin to fall onto our bridge. We work in groups to shove them off the edge while they’re still debilitated. Let the sharks sort them out while they thrash in the water.

I’m hoisting a net with a team of guys, ready to toss it over an angel, when I see my mom wandering around in the middle of all this, shouting to herself. I drop the net, letting the three other guys handle it, and run over to frantically try to get her under cover.

She’s too busy to listen to me. After a few seconds, I realize she’s shouting commands to the shaved cult members.

The cult members are tackling the newly landed angels off the edge of the bridge. Their robes flutter in the air as they wrestle and fall over the edge with them.

They also swan dive from the bridge as the angels fly low and get near. They grab onto the angels in midair like human projectiles. The angels, not expecting the extra weight of someone dragging on their wings, plunge into the water – pinwheels of arms and legs and wings. I hope those bald people can swim.

My mom shouts out commands like a general in battle, even though no one can hear her. Still, her message is clear if only because of her arm motions as she rhythmically dispatches her people into graceful swan dives off the bridge.

For those who dive, there’s good motivation in catching themselves an angel, because the angel will slow down their fall, and they will have a chance of surviving the dive. The ones who miss their aim are on a suicide mission.

I worry about my mom diving as well, but she seems to have no shortage of volunteers waiting for her command. The woman has a job to do in the middle of all this battle, and she doesn’t look like she’s about to abandon it.

Hopefully, her job will keep her from obsessing over what’s happening with Paige. As worried as I am, I know that if my sister weren’t fighting to win over the locusts, they’d be attacking us right now along with the angels.

We’re doing way better than I imagined, and I’m beginning to let myself believe that we might have a shot at winning this battle. I can almost hear the people cheering in my imagination when I see the sky darken with more angels.

It’s a new wave of them. And it’s a much larger group than the one that’s already here.

On the way toward us, some of the angels swing low over the water, capsizing boats and giving their drenched and wounded comrades a hand. The winged warriors in the bay climb onto the capsized boats as the humans frantically swim away. They cling on awkwardly like drowning hawks, shaking their wings out and spraying the bloody water off them.

The gunners follow the new angels with streams of bullets. Angels continue to get shot out of the sky and into the shark-infested bay, but the new group hovers out of reach like spectators. They see what’s happening with their fellow warriors, and they stay back.

I’m wondering what they’ll do next when I notice that the angels are split into three groups. The first is the one that came right after the locusts. I catch glimpses of Uriel shouting in that group. The second is the mass of wings hovering at a higher altitude than Uriel’s group. I can almost feel their cold eyes glaring down at us, watching and judging.

Then there’s the smallest group. Their wings are dark and tattered. They could hardly be called angels. A white-winged Adonis swoops across them.

It’s Raffe with his Watchers.

If one group is Uriel’s and the other is Raffe’s, then who are the others? Are they spectators here to watch the blood hunt?

It hits me that the real battle is only just beginning.

Even if Uriel wanted to back off and try again another time, he can’t now, not without everyone in the host knowing that he backed down. What kind of blood hunter would he be?

Uriel and his angels must realize it at the same time I do, because they suddenly dive-bomb us.

The music is still blaring. The closer they get, the louder it is for them, but they commit to their attack.

The lights turn off, pitching us into the dark.

I feel the makeshift stage thunking with the weight of bodies landing hard around me.

The lights turn back on.

Around me are three angel warriors. They leap up, punching blindly as they spin in place with their eyes shut. They can’t see, and the noise must be pounding their heads into mush, yet they’re ready to fight.

Angels land all over the bridge. Some are crashing, lying broken on the concrete. Enough of them make it, though – uninjured enough to kill the nearest human even as they’re adjusting to the light and recovering from their impact.

A bloody fight erupts on the bridge. People everywhere are running or fighting. The gunners aren’t sure what to do, and they stutter in their aim. They can’t open fire on the bridge without hitting our own people, and the angels above us are mostly out of easy range.

The angels don’t even pull out their weapons. Either

they’re worried about my little trick with the sword I no longer have or they’re so confident that they don’t bother with weapons.

We can’t beat angels one-on-one. We had anticipated the ground crew having to fight some angels who landed or fell onto the bridge, but not the entire angel host. That was as far as our planning skills and time allowed.

People are getting slaughtered as angels punch our fighters off the bridge or break their backs or kick them into oblivion. People use their handguns or rifles to shoot at the angels despite the risk of hitting other people.

I raise my knife against an angel who heads my way. It feels really flimsy compared with the sword I used to have. I don’t know if he can see me now or not, but he has murder in his eyes. He knows he’s going to kill. It’s just a question of who.

If I’m super lucky, I might be able to fight him off and maybe even the warrior after him, but it’s not a long-term survival strategy. By long-term, I mean the next ten minutes.

We’re screwed.

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Knowing we signed up for this doesn’t help even if we all knew our chances of survival were close to zero. Actually being faced with death is totally different.

My hands are trembling and clumsy as I brace for a fight. I try to calm down so I can fight effectively, but adrenaline screams through my veins, making me jittery.

As I calculate my best options, I see motion out of the edge of my vision. Another angel has snuck up on me. His wings are golden and his face chiseled, but he looks at me with the cold eyes of a killer.

Before I can figure out what to do, snowy wings blot out the angel.

It’s Raffe.

And he has two of his Watchers backing him up.

My heart races even though I thought it was already going full speed. He has his back to me as if completely confident I won’t attack him, despite the fact that we’re enemies.

He punches the attacker, then grabs him and tosses him off the stage.

I let out a deep breath. My hands shake with relief. Raffe is fighting another angel, not humans.

He whips out his sword, ready to strike. I step back-to-back with him, slicing at the other angel coming at us. His Watchers step to each side of us, making a defensive perimeter around us.