The Archangel Agenda: An Evangeline Heart Thriller Read online

  “Which is why they seek out this Azazel, to learn what he can teach them so they finally can overcome?”

  “I’m afraid so, yes.”

  “And he teaches them horrible things?”

  “Unfortunately, yes. When Azazel and his Watchers first instructed men in the way of war, men worshiped them and the archangels—understandably—liked the feel of their worship. Hundreds of years passed that way, and God trusted his archangels to bring him news of men and what was going on, but Azazel never told God everything, which was part of what angered God so much when he found out what Azazel and his Watchers had done by teaching men the ways of war.

  “Now Azazel is still teaching, but he’s gone far beyond teaching simple warcraft. Now he teaches men the gifts of wizardry and sorcery, telepathy, and all manner of what you term paranormal.”

  “But why? What’s in it for Azazel?” None of this made sense and it was totally freaking me out. I’d seen plenty of power-hungry men though, men willing to do whatever it took to control the masses and earn their worship—whether by fair or by foul. Azazel was basically a big bully.

  “Azazel liked how things were before Noah and the flood. He liked Earth, he liked being thought of as a god, and most of all, he liked earthly women. Lucifer liked that setup as well, and they want it put back into place. God is well aware of what Lucifer and Azazel want. And he does what he must to keep them from returning to power, which is ensuring that the holy souls—Abel’s line—are protected both here and in Heaven. Those souls are precious to God, because they belonged to Abel and he loved Abel above all and looked on him with favor. God keeps the holy souls from going to hell. He hoards the holy lines and ensures every one of those descendants goes to heaven so he can keep track of their souls—keep them safe.

  “But Azazel knows that if he can intercept and control those souls—grabbing them before they make it to heaven—he can use those souls to leverage his way back onto Earth and the ‘good old days’ when the wicked ruled alongside angels.”

  “How?”

  “Those souls have power. Because God favors the holy lines, they also carry a supernatural essence far beyond the others. If utilized on Earth during the person’s life, this essence can manifest in spectacular ways.”

  “And if they don’t use their powers on Earth?” Griffin was as far from supernatural as a guy could get. He was a plain-Jane, vanilla kind of guy. If he had this holy blood, he’d kept his essence stuffed way down.

  “Then when they ascend, that power still resides in them and it can be harnessed. With enough souls like that, Azazel could use their power against God, much like Lucifer tried when he began the war of angels.”

  “They’re stealing Griffin’s soul power so they can overthrow God?”

  Lucifer had failed spectacularly in his first attempt. I hated the thought of these awful archangels somehow using Griffin as a pawn in a war. Especially one with such huge stakes. The first war of the angels had drastically altered everyone’s future, condemning an entire caste of angels to be kicked out of heaven and forcing Lucifer to rule the underworld and watch all that he’d lost as humans remained on Earth and communed with God.

  “Correct. In God’s eyes, those souls deserve to be safe simply because they’re from the good bloodline, but Azazel and Lucifer see it differently. They don’t understand doing the right thing just because it’s right. Azazel does things only for the power play, so he cannot fathom God’s reasoning for wanting those souls with Him in heaven. Azazel thinks God is using those souls and he wants to do the same. He wants to do whatever it takes to put things back to rights.

  “Holy hell.” I took a step back. Metatron was asking me to step into the middle of the holy war of all holy wars. No wonder we humans warred and hated and fought when the angels couldn’t even get it right. “The backlash for this is going to be horrendous, isn’t it?”

  He stared intently at me and I could feel him weighing every decision I’d made during my years here—and possibly every one from now on as well as the ones I’d made before I got here. I couldn’t breathe and it had nothing to do with his supernatural powers.

  “You don’t have anyone left to lose.”

  I bent in half, as if he’d sucker-punched me right in the diaphragm. “Jesus,” I wheezed and grabbed my knees.

  “Well,” he said, matter-of-fact.

  I was still gasping for breath. “You’re a jerk.”

  He shrugged. “You’re the one who asked for details.”

  I straightened and forced myself to get back into work-mode where emotions didn’t exist. “Why now? Azazel’s been around for millenniums.”

  “Good question.” He took a step closer and reached for me but I dodged him. I needed to stay focused. “Azazel knows that Judgment is near and if he’s to overthrow God, it must be now.”

  “Why?”

  “At Judgment, Azazel’s imprisonment is over.”

  My breath caught in my throat. I wasn’t sure I wanted that guy roaming around sexing up anyone again.

  “He’ll be thrown in a fiery pit for all eternity.”

  I let out a loud breath. “What?”

  “Azazel told Harrold about the relics and where he thinks they are.”

  “Great, where’s this guy so I can off him? And where are the other relics?”

  “I wish it were that easy. I cannot know everything about your realm and Azazel knows it, which is why he’s worked so hard to teach humans his ways. Harrold travels undetected by myself and other archangels. He’s strongly protected by the evil realm. That means I can’t tell you where he is or what he plans to do next. Your mother’s interaction with him was the only way I knew he existed.”

  “Well that’s helpful.” Seriously, he wasn’t giving me a damn thing, and Azazel had imparted all the wisdom of the entire Watcher realm. Bad guys always had the advantage.

  And yet, I still managed to kill them and save the day.

  This time wouldn’t be any different. I didn’t lose.

  “There’s more.”

  I threw my hands up. “Really? Is there any good news coming?”

  He crossed his arms and stared at me. “You don’t know how to take the easy jobs, Lina. You secretly like that this seems impossible. Don’t kid me.”

  I stared at my shoes, not denying what he’d said. The extra layer of supernatural surrounding this mission would have sent the best running, but I wanted to dig in deeper. The higher the stakes, the more I wanted to prove it could be done. Granted, the personal stakes were high, too. My love’s soul hung in the balance. This was the ultimate mission. I blew out a breath and admitted he was right.

  Metatron nodded crisply, pleased that I’d finally quit pretending. “There is a way for you to arm yourself against Azazel. Knowledge that I gave to Noah and Abraham, knowledge Azazel doesn’t even know. In my book—”

  “The Book of Enoch,” I whispered as Mom’s history and theology lessons came racing back from where I’d hidden them along with all my other memories of her. I recited one of her favorite lessons: “Enoch walked faithfully with God; then he was no more, because God took him away.” I stared at him. “She always liked that part, that God took him away.”

  “Well, it was certainly my favorite.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, I’ll bet.” More of the memory came back. “You were Enoch before you ascended. As a human, you wrote down your visions of things to come, both good and bad. Then they took you to them, showed you those places so you could catalog it all for future generations ... and past.”

  I couldn’t remember all of it, but there had been descriptions about heaven and hell and the throne room, the deeds of angels, the powers they bestowed when they interacted with early humans ... and how those acts caused the great flood....

  “That’s right.” He seemed excited that I knew about his book. Mom was enamored with it. I’d forgotten. My heart ached.

  “I loved your mother, Lina. S
he was my favorite and I tried my best to help her where I could. The first day she reached out to me, I was quite shocked.” He looked away and blushed, which shocked me. “Few ever asked for my aid, and I was okay with that because I knew that was not my calling, but your mother was so earnest in her plea that I could not resist her. Our long discussions were some of my favorite moments.”

  “You had actual discussions with my mother?”

  “Exactly like we are having now. She was divinely connected.”

  I tipped my head to the side. “Wow,” was all I could say.

  He chuckled. “Your mother called my book a supernatural book of secrets.”

  “Why?”

  “When God gave me the task of keeping the archangel history, I didn’t suppress any of what I saw. I thought God meant to give that information to more than just a few humans. I thought I was creating something that would lead mankind into a new generation of intelligence. I—mistakenly—thought that God wanted mankind to have the knowledge bestowed by the Watchers, as long as he knew what was being taught, which were the lessons I thought I was documenting in my book. My supernatural book of secrets.”

  “Great!” I held out my hands. That sounded exactly like what I needed to arm myself with for this upcoming war. “Give it up.”

  He stepped away and bumped into a frozen tourist, knocking her askew. He reached up and adjusted her, pulling her camera down from her face and tipping it so she’d be looking at her daughter when he unfroze her.

  “I’m bound by a different set of rules than Azazel. God decides when I can impart this knowledge, and He’s chosen to stay out of this.”

  My eyes widened. “He’s going to stand by while some guy flings open the gates of hell?”

  “He made covenants that He wouldn’t intervene again. This one will be up to mankind to get it right.”

  My knees buckled but I caught myself and tried to get a grip on what he was saying. “So even when the bad guys have secrets that put them at a massive advantage, you can’t help out the good guys?” I narrowed my eyes, fitting pieces of his comments and the movie and his involvement in Mom’s life together until my stomach soured with a horrible realization. “You could have saved Mother, couldn’t you?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  I ground my teeth together. “And you chose to obey God’s lack of instruction?”

  He ran a hand through his hair. “It’s more complicated than that. There are rules upon rules. If I help one, then I have to help them all. I’m not allowed to play favorites.”

  I crossed my arms. “Then why are you here? You want me to believe that you pop in to see anyone who sends a prayer your way?”

  “Those men I was allowed to help—Abraham and Noah—they were from holy blood, Abel’s blood.”

  “And?”

  “There are reasons that I can’t help you like that, but I can guide you. There’s a man, a scholar, who’s spent his life studying my book. Find him and he’ll be able to guide you to the relics.”

  Now we were getting somewhere. I needed intel so I could figure out my next step and plan this mission. “Great. Who is he?”

  He shook his head.

  “You can’t even tell me that? What good are you?”

  “Yes, well, that’s why I inspired the invention of Google. I can tell you that he resides in the United Kingdom.”

  I rolled my eyes. “Whatever. Are we done here?”

  “Yes. Start with the village. If the relic is there, then you’ll only need to ask the scholar about the other two.”

  “Why would this scholar help me? I’ll bet he gets questions about these relics all the time.”

  “Doubtful. And, he’ll have had divine inspiration between now and when you get there.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, realizing I’d accepted both what he was telling me, and the assignment. He really was an archangel, who used to be a man, and now he wanted me to take on the Angel of Death, find three relics before Azazel’s student, Harrold, did—my mother’s murderer—and go get Griffin’s soul out of Hell and through the gates of Heaven. Easy-peasy. Sure.

  “Oh, and Evangelina?”

  I arched an eyebrow, not liking his tone at all.

  “A soul can only be reclaimed for a short time. Once Griffin’s been there for too long, you won’t like what he’s become. He’ll be one of them.”

  Chapter Eight

  Jordan was like I’d remembered, dry and sandy. But there was also a comfort of coming home. I’d spent my formative years here, had come into myself here. The desert would always hold a special place in my heart. I just hadn’t realized it until setting foot on the soil.

  I found a guide—Nyan, a spindly, energetic teen—and after a fierce negotiation over fees, he agreed to take me to the encampment.

  “There are only remains,” Nyan said. “After it burned down, there weren’t enough members of the community who wanted to rebuild.”

  That didn’t sit well for the recon I needed to do, but maybe I’d find a clue hidden somewhere. “They never tried to rebuild it?”

  Nyan shook his head and we set out toward the deserted camp on roads that hadn’t changed much in all the time I’d been gone. “The spirit world claimed the village and the elders feared angering them.”

  My stomach sank and the tension knots in my shoulders and neck tightened at the thought that coming to Jordan might prove completely fruitless. If the villagers had all fled that night never to return, I might find the grove untouched with the ring right were my mom left it, but that was a longshot. Nothing stayed unchanged here. Sand shifted, looters looted, and animals scavenged. The odds were against me.

  I was silent during most of the drive, letting the movies of my memories play as we passed one thing after another that brought up day after day of my childhood. The broken ruins of the market hit me hard, and I strained to hear the echoes of hagglers and hawkers moving their wares. Without refrigeration or electricity, we had gone to the market every day, and we’d looked forward to the timeout from work to commune together. The sellers were all friends of my parents and we never had to haggle too hard for our dinner, but I’d learned the art there.

  We bumped farther down the road and I saw the crumbled foundation of my school in the distance. I’d walked two miles every day so I could attend a morning session before spending the afternoon excavating with Mom. I’d railed against it in the beginning, but I’d forged fierce friendships with the girls I’d gone to school with and I think Mom had wanted that for me, far more that than the simple math I’d learned in those warm mornings inside the building.

  Nyan drove to the edge of an open expanse of field and I frowned. “What’s this?”

  “The encampment. The old village.”

  I looked behind us, and calculated the distance in my head. Sure enough, we’d come the way I’d remembered, and there should have been a mighty village here.

  Scars of burned buildings were visible, but only because I knew where to look. I got out and walked the path that should have led me through the center of town. My friend’s house should have been on the left, Dad’s hospital should have stood on the right. There weren’t even crumbled foundations. The fire had burned so long and hot that the ashes had blown away on the dry, acrid wind.

  I turned right and walked to the dig. Wind had half-filled it with sand. A broken ladder lay at the bottom of the tree, save two rungs.

  Nyan came up beside me. “What happened to all the bits that they’d found here?”

  “The looters took most of it. The elders say they were looking for magic.”

  I snorted. That was nearly true. If Harrold had wanted the relic so Azazel could open the gates of Hell, that was magic none of us wanted to deal with. “Did they leave anything?”

  “A few items, but the elders sold them quickly to keep the bad spirits away.”

  I paced off the distance to where the trees that hid Mom would have be
en. I kicked at the sand, but nothing was there, not even a trace. Not that I’d believed it would be that easy. Nothing ever was. I’d come here to find information as much as the actual relic.

  “Do you know who they sold them to?”

  He shook his head and tried to move back toward the vehicle. “If there’s nothing else, maybe we should go.”

  I nodded. “Can you take me to the elders?”

  He tugged on my shirt and got me moving. “There’s a single one still alive.”

  “Great.” I couldn’t believe that everything had been so completely destroyed that night. My heart had hoped to find some final token of my life, something of my parents that I could have taken back with me.

  The only thing left was heartache.

  My guide quickly sped back to town, and weaved his way through the other motorists and people. We stopped at an ornate temple and he pointed toward the door. “Ask for Tenyan. Tell him I took you there, and tell him your mother’s name.”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Does anyone remember her?”

  “Oh, yes,” he said, emphatically. “She brought much knowledge with her. We still celebrate her. Our parents and grandparents all pass stories about the great and famous Madeline Heart.”

  That warmed my entire being. They’d always been such a loving people, and it didn’t surprise me in the least that my mom had found a way to leave a legacy.

  I thanked him and tipped him, then walked to the temple. I hadn’t been in one for a long time, and with each step, my legs felt heavier. I had so many unanswered questions beyond this relic. People bustled past me and I pushed forward. I had the mission to concentrate on, and I had to keep that at the forefront.

  Chapter Nine

  I pushed beyond the tourists into the areas of the temple where I knew the elders would be housed. At the innermost door, I pressed a buzzer and heard it ring deeper in the building. I glanced over my shoulder, but no one paid me any mind, too enamored by the intricate beauty of the ancient temple.