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  Black Tide

  A Matt Rowley Novel

  By

  Patrick Freivald

  JournalStone

  San Francisco

  Copyright © 2015 by Patrick Freivald

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  JournalStone books may be ordered through booksellers or by contacting:

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  The views expressed in this work are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

  ISBN: 978-1-942712-00-8 (sc)

  ISBN: 978-1-942712-01-5 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015932366

  Printed in the United States of America

  JournalStone rev. date: April 17, 2015

  Cover Design: Rob Grom

  Cover Photograph © Shutterstock.com

  Edited by: Vincenzo Bilof and Amy Lynne Eye

  Black Water

  Chapter 1

  Matt Rowley tightened the turban across his face and hoped his light brown eyes wouldn't blow his cover. The dark contacts he'd worn had crusted with grit during the sandstorm, so he'd torn them out. The pre-dawn gloom had shielded him this far. He took a deep breath and stepped into the tent.

  Beneath cloying sage lay the acrid stink of human sweat and a lingering tang of gunpowder. Through the haze he identified four targets: three obvious guards held AK-47s in casual grips, and a fourth lurked behind the muslin curtain. The infrared signature of the last man spiked white at its core, even through the cloth—far too hot to be human. His eyes widened at the TV in the corner. The fifty-plus-inch flat-panel clashed with the austere, faux-Bedouin pile of rugs and tapestries that made up the rest of the decor.

  On the muted TV, Ramiel stood in front of a crowd in Cairo, black hair slicked back, fine suit bulging to contain his enormous musculature as he used his fist like a gavel to punctuate each point. The podium cracked under the last blow. The caption on top said "LIVE," and in the bottom corner 3:36 p.m. Four minutes. Matt wondered how many there were, and if destroying this Ramiel would destroy them all.

  "As-salaamu ʽalaykum," the front guard said in a Syrian accent, running a hand across his stubbled chin. "Place your hands on your head." Matt suffered through the frisk as the wind howled outside, drowning the sound of automatic weapons chattering in the besieged town a kilometer away. The ground shuddered, and moments later the explosion reached his ears.

  He lowered his hands and tried his own Arabic. "I'm here to see Ramiel." Their eyes narrowed. His eidetic memory enabled him to learn languages much faster than most, but though he had an ear for accents, he had no tongue. Although not a betting man, he'd still wager that Tennessee-tinted Arabic didn't get much play this side of Damascus. That, and he'd used the egregoroi's name, and none of their intel could nail down whether or not that constituted blasphemy in this cult.

  "You are American?" the guard continued in Arabic. A helicopter roared overhead.

  He nodded without taking his eyes from the mujahidin. The other two tightened their holds on the AKs but didn't raise them.

  "And yet you submit yourself to Allah, Mohammed His prophet, and Ramiel His emissary?"

  "I don't. I'm just here to see him."

  The weapons came up as the front guard stepped back. All pretense of calm or compassion had disappeared from his voice. "Kneel."

  "No. I'm here to talk to Ramiel, not let you shoot me in the head."

  "Kneel!" The guard's knuckles turned white, his finger eased toward the trigger.

  "I'd rather not kill your guards," Matt said to the figure behind the curtain. "But if they don't put down those weapons, I'm going to have to." Of the abilities he had lost when Gerstner stepped off of the table, he missed precognition the most—though not the psychotic whispers that came with it. Even without, his augmented reflexes and strength made dealing with three normals a trivial exercise, especially at point-blank range.

  "You seem . . . confident." Ramiel spoke perfect Oxford English with a slight brogue, his voice a deep baritone. The guards froze at the sound, their watery eyes darting in the hazy smoke. "I'd like to see this." He barked out an order in Arabic. "Kill him."

  Matt stepped forward and drove his forehead into the bridge of the front guard's nose. The man's cranium imploded, and Matt wrested the AK from his grip as he fell. The left guard's weapon barked, shredding the air Matt had just occupied. In a single movement Matt drove his fingers into the shooting man's throat and snap-kicked the other in the leg.

  A sickening crack accompanied the second man to the floor, and he screamed and writhed, hands gripping his shattered knee. The gunfire stopped as the shooter reached up to his ruined throat, eyes wide in shock and incomprehension. Matt jerked his hand back in a spray of arterial blood, brought up the AK and pointed it at the squirming, screaming man on the ground.

  Next to him, the choking guard fell. Bright crimson bubbles gurgled from his obliterated pharynx as he gasped for breath. Matt fired two tight bursts, one at each target, and the room fell silent. Then the dead men's bowels let go, completing the smell of death Matt found all too familiar: blood, gunpowder, and shit.

  The curtain parted and Ramiel stepped through, heat pouring off him in waves. Matt trained the AK-47 on the shirtless man, a wall of rippling muscle in draw-string khaki pants and bare feet. The fallen angel smiled at the gun and then at Matt. "So much changed during my eternity in the Pit. Such disrespect for your betters."

  "You've enslaved thousands of people." He caught the TV in his peripheral vision. 3:39. One minute. "Most of us don't go for that these days, respect-wise."

  "Do they wear chains? Is worship slavery?"

  A memory shuddered through Matt, a ram-headed angel with wings of silver feathers, a surrender of everything in three impossible words. I am yours.

  He snarled his answer. "Yes. It is."

  Ramiel shrugged. "This new ideology is much as the old: convert or die. Your illusion of choice is alien to me, your sacrificed Jew a fairy tale invented by the young." The room grew dark, the wind howled. Sulfur mingled with the sage and blood and shit, and black worms writhed beneath Ramiel's skin. Despair and hopelessness stabbed Matt's mind, and he gritted his teeth at the psychic barbs. "You can't hurt me, Mister Rowley, not with fists or feet or that sad little instrument. So kneel, and face your true purpose."

  A soft white glow enveloped the attack, worming into and through the tendrils of black thought, and Ramiel's grin faltered.

  "There's something in you." The disjointed shards of millions of Jade addicts, dull impressions of the living and bright incoherent sparks of the dead, swirled unseen in the space between space, a spiritual white noise that had grown along with his returning abilities. He sometimes recognized splintered remnants of personalities, Janet LaLonde; his wife, Monica; their son, Adam. Most of the time it blended into an indecipherable blur. Now it tensed, squeezed, and shattered Ramiel's probing attack.

  The angel stumbled back a step, then regained his composure.

  "I've got a lot of company these days." Matt tapped his temple.

  Ramiel put a finger to the side of his nose, a pensive gesture at odds with the situation. "Yes, them, anybody can see them. Hard to see
anything else through the beehive you've got around you. But under them, under you . . ." His face brightened in wonder and joy. "She's there. Our daughter is alive."

  The TV clicked to 3:40, and a metal hook cut through the canvas. Matt grabbed the wobbling steel and clamped it on a post. The tent tore away from the ground. Ramiel looked up at the helicopter buzzing past, tow cable lashing back and forth in the buffeting wind. Matt squinted against the sand in his eyes and pulled the trigger.

  A spray of bullets shredded the meat of Ramiel's face, exposing black bone and red-hot embers. The angel stumbled backward as Matt emptied the magazine. It clicked dry and Matt grabbed the barrel, skin smoking and hissing where it touched the metal, and swung.

  Ramiel blocked the blow with his arm, and the weapon bent. Gritting his teeth against the skin sloughing off of his fingers, Matt swung again, and this time the angel caught it. A fist crushed into Matt's sternum and he fell back, coughing blood, his chest a red fire. He dropped to one knee and groped for another assault rifle, sand clumping on his bloody fingers.

  His watch beeped. He dove to the side, and on cue a streak of fire impacted the angel center-of-mass.

  Ramiel disappeared in a fireball that blasted Matt to the ground. Ears throbbing, Matt scrambled sideways, his chest screaming agony with each movement. Another AGM-176 missile followed, and another, and another. Payload spent, the drone banked skyward, and Matt struggled to his feet.

  Matt and the egregoroi—a Watcher freed from Tartarus by Frau Gerstner, the last of the Nephilim—had an audience now. Dozens of men milled about in confused panic, cowered from the skies. Some readied surface-to-air missiles, and gaped in astonishment at the remains of the man they believed to be Allah's emissary.

  Ramiel knelt in a pool of molten sand, the glowing red silicon no brighter than the coals that smoldered beneath his exposed bones. Every scrap of flesh had burned away. The shreds not destroyed by the missiles had been consumed by the furnace raging in his chest. Withered, skeletal wings unfolded behind the abomination, and it roared through rows of serrated black teeth.

  Matt braced for the psychic shockwave that poured out of Ramiel and closed his eyes against the hot, gritty wind. Ramiel's rage burned through him, scoured his bones, wracked his soul. A vast nothing opened in his mind, a dark wind of insatiable need and want and bloodlust, an unquenchable thirst devoid of human pity. White filament wrapped his arms and legs, held him above the eye of the storm and the gaping pit below. He lifted from the ground, higher and higher, until he opened his eyes.

  The tent city lay before him, lashed with the dying gasps of the sandstorm. A hundred-odd men stared wide-eyed at the creature screaming in the glowing pit of molten sand. A man cried, "Efrit!" Another joined him, and another. The crowd stumbled forward, shrieking their reproach as the winch hauled Matt up to the helicopter. They cried "Efrit!" again and again, and with each utterance the egregoroi withered.

  Matt flipped upright, his chest a tight knot of pain as he grabbed Tsuji "Blossom" Sakura's offered hand. With the help of a uniformed man beside her, she hauled him onboard. He landed in the seat amidst the deafening roar and Sakura gave him a thumbs-up.

  He leaned back, wiped sand and blood from his lips, and put on a pair of headphones with an integrated microphone. "How'd we do?"

  Sakura slammed the door shut. "Good. Cameras caught all of it." She pointed to the bank of monitors linked to the video feed from the C-130 far above. "Uplink is live. The world knows."

  On the monitors, a half-dozen Ramiels stumbled to their knees and smoldered. CNN, Al Jazeera, FOX, BBC, they all zoomed in as the charismatic leader who'd enraptured thousands faltered in his live speech at six different locations. Split-screen, the hacked signal broadcast the growing, shouting crowd around the blackened, demonic skeleton.

  It looked up, crouched, and leapt.

  The pilot jinked right, and the black form streaked past them, missing the rotors by centimeters. Skeletal wings spread, it roared and dove. Claws four inches long punched right through the door. The soldier scrambled in mad panic, a useless gesture in his flight harness. Matt helped himself to the man's service pistol and shot the claws, point-blank.

  Shards of boiling-hot keratin ricocheted through the cabin, and Sakura cried out. Matt fired again anyway as the bolts holding the door shuddered and bent.

  "Matt!"

  He turned as Sakura tossed him his AA-12 combat shotgun. Behind him, metal sheared and air rushed in, loud even through the headphones.

  Hovering twenty feet away, Ramiel spun and threw the door.

  The pilot jerked up and it dinged off the landing skids with a shudder.

  Matt took two steps and leapt into open space, pulling the trigger as he slammed into the demonic form. His standard-issue fin-guided fragmentation rounds had been blessed by a bishop, a dubious but cooperative rabbi, and an Imam, just in case—he had no idea if any of it did any good. They entered the joint where Ramiel's wings met his back and exploded.

  Chunks of smoldering flesh spattered Matt with a sizzle, and as they fell his robe caught fire. He grabbed the damaged wing one-handed and put his feet on Ramiel's back, then twisted his body. His muscles bulged. He gritted his teeth against the strain. The bone shifted in its socket, and then the tendons tore free with a dry crackle. He let go and a gust buffeted the skeletal wing upward and away.

  Wind drew the fire up his robe, and burning cotton mingled with the stench of smoldering hair. Feet on Ramiel's back, he pointed the shotgun down and pulled the trigger, full-auto. Round after round plunged into the falling angel, rupturing flesh and blowing apart bone, but it healed almost as fast as he destroyed it.

  Matt braced for impact. A year ago, a thirty-foot fall wouldn't have even fazed him. This wasn't a year ago. Neither his reflexes nor his regeneration worked like they used to.

  He bent his knees and used Ramiel's body as a cushion, then tucked to roll as they hit. A sickening crunch, and white-hot flame seared through his right leg. His head hit the ground and he saw stars. Writhing, he rolled to put out the flame, to get away from the burning rage underneath him.

  He tried to crawl with his arms and left leg, his right one hanging useless behind him. Over the howling wind the demon shrieked, and over that the crowd chanted, "Efrit! Efrit!" Someone covered him with a blanket and beat out the flames, each impact an explosion of pain from his leg. He turned his head to the side, cheek against hot sand.

  Ramiel stood, a withered wing clawing its way into reality where the severed one had been, the stench of brimstone smoking off of the malformed limb. At full height Ramiel stood four meters, a titan of charred bones glowing red from internal heat. It screamed at the crowd in a language Matt didn't know, something akin to but not Hebrew. Its voice drowned in the crowd's chant of rebuke.

  It withered further, tendrils of smoke where blazing shimmers of flame had been. Wisps of ash fell from his crumbling skeleton as the crowd pressed forward into the sulfurous cloud of stench, burnt matches and charred bone. Matt panted on the ground, trying not to pass out as the pain in his leg faded to a numb burning sensation. The wind screamed, joining the demon and the crowd in its fury.

  A vortex formed around the demon, an opaque, howling tornado of grit and sand, shot through with gouts of flame. The crowd dropped to its knees and with a single voice praised Allah for their deliverance.

  Sakura's voice cut through the noise, and Matt realized he still wore his headphones. "Matt, you alive?"

  "Yeah." He gritted his teeth against the pain and the whirling sand that seared tiny holes in his exposed skin. "Can't walk, though. Extraction requested."

  "Be right there."

  An eternity passed, then the world shuddered. As the helicopter landed, a streak of ashy mist shot skyward from the maelstrom. The wind died, the crowd stopped, and sand rained from above, revealing the morning sun under a pale blue sky. Matt hissed as someone lifted him by the shoulders, and as they dragged him to the helicopter he looked at where Ramiel had
stood.

  A sand-crusted pillar, still red-hot, stood like an obelisk in a pool of hardening glass.

  "Is it dead?" Sakura asked through the headphones. Automatic weapons chattered in the distance. Something exploded in the distant city, the fireball rising into the sky.

  Matt shook his head. "I don't think you can kill these things, not permanently. But it won't be enslaving anyone's mind for a while. I hope."

  Back on the chopper, he watched the monitors as Sakura cut off his pants and splinted his leg. Ramiel, all of them, had melted, burst into flame, or crumbled to ash the moment the wind had stopped. Sakura didn't comment on Matt's frayed, light blue boxers with red hearts, a gift from Monica too many years ago.

  "How's my leg?"

  "Give it a couple days. You'll be fine."

  He healed a thousand times slower than he used to. From a compound fracture to Olympic sprints might take as long as a week.

  "How did you know?" the soldier asked them, his accent a thick Scottish brogue.

  "Know what?" Sakura asked.

  "That it'd work?"

  Matt shrugged. "We didn't. Ramiel went out of his way for publicity, and the more popular he got the more power he demonstrated, so we thought maybe his growing power depended upon his worshippers. Expose him for what he is, and down he goes."

  "Shit. What would've happened if you were wrong?"

  Matt shrugged again. "I’d be dead, and the Earth would drown in a religious firestorm."

  "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph."

  Matt leaned back and closed his eyes, letting the chopper's percussion sing him to sleep.

  Chapter 2

  Monica Rowley looked up as the deck stairs creaked. She set down her tea, rushed to the door, put her finger to her lips, and opened it.