Chapter 2

Selene bolted up as the feather on her coffee table began to spin wildly, with a glowing vapor wafting up from the silky strands. She crouched down beside the table and stared at the feather as it came to a sudden stop and the crystalline aurora became more focused and pressured, instantly being pushed away from the tip of the feather as if it were in a wind tunnel. It actually looked like passing comet, wrapped up in its tail. The feather began to twitch, with the tip changing direction by only a millimeter of so with each shift.

Bringing her face down low to the table, she looked in the direction that the feather was pointing. Even without having ever seen something like this, Selene knew that there was a definite purpose for what was going on. In her gut, she knew that feather was actually pointing to something, and whatever it was, she knew it would have the answers she was looking for.

She got dressed and ran out the door with the deather, determined to follow it, wherever it led her.

Baltoh and Abaddon crashed through a wall of stone, entering an ancient cave system deep below the city of New York. Moving so fast that they were reduced to blurs, they locked blades over an over in an endless dance that had been going on for hours. With each collision, a vast cascade of sparks would fill the air, as well dust and shrapnel from every rock and piece of stone shattering from the created shockwaves. Only thanks to Baltoh’s barrier was all the damage instantly repaired and the affects of the battle kept from being noticed by the outside world.

‘Damn it, why is this battle still going on? It is true that he is far stronger than any normal Demon, but I would normally end a battle like this in less than a minute, but I feel so ... dull. I can’t focus my mind or my energy. I feel like I’m bleeding to death,’ Baltoh thought, trying to force all distractions out of his mind.

Disengaging from Baltoh’s sword, Abaddon flew backwards and pointed his clawed finger at his mortal enemy, as if he were pretending to fire a gun.

“Demon Art: Abyss Blast!” he thundered.

A colossal beam of dark energy erupted from the tip of his claw like a comic book villain’s giant death ray.

“Angel Art: Gates of Heaven!” Baltoh countered, planting his sword in the ground.

Shaking the whole tunnel, an ornate gateway of solid gold burst from the tunnel in front of Baltoh. Glowing like a huge neon sign, the gate shielded Baltoh from the blast, with the shadow energy unable to even pass between the bars.

“Demon Art: Debt Retrieval!” Baltoh then cast.

Beneath Abaddon, a portal to Hell opened and a massive skeleton hand reached up, grabbing the Demon with its crushing embrace like a man grabbing an action figure and ending the Abyss Blast. With the beam halted, Baltoh released the Gates of Heaven spell and pounced on Abaddon with his sword held low for an uppercut slash.

With a monstrous roar, Abaddon swung his tail and struck the hand, shattering all of the bones and freeing himself. Abaddon retrieved his sword, having just enough time to block Baltoh’s upward slash. The two blades met and the Demon was instantly thrown straight up by the sheer power behind the slash, crashing through level upon level of cave systems.

Eventually gaining control of his momentum, Abaddon became intangible and slowed himself down, passing up into an empty subway platform. The chamber had two subway tracks with a twin lines of pillars on the platform between them, a long staircase leading up to the street on one side of the chamber but was blocked off due to repairs needing to be made to the platform, and a wall with a dozen payphones stood on the opposite wall. The platform was on the very fringes of Baltoh’s original barrier, meaning that if they moved any higher, they would no longer be undetectable.

After solidifying and stepping down onto the floor, Abaddon stepped back as Baltoh shot up from below with his sword straight up. Having missed Abaddon, Baltoh became the victim of his own inertia and plunged his sword into ceiling, sending a spider web of cracks through the concrete and causing rubble to rain down. Before Baltoh could readjust his sense of direction and find Abaddon, the Demon appeared behind him, spun around for momentum, and delivered an earth-shaking kick. Baltoh was sent careening like a skipping stone and crashed straight through one of the rows of pillars like a wrecking ball through Styrofoam.

Coming to a stop, Baltoh raised his sword to block an execution-style slash from Abaddon. The two enemies stared each other down, each pushing against the sword of the other. As the screeching sound of the straight-razor-sized blades on Abaddon’s sword grinding against the glassy serrations of Baltoh’s, the latter gave a smile. With more than twice as much strength as Abaddon, Baltoh released one hand from his sword, while the Demon was left still desperately pushing with all the strength in both of his arms.

Helpless to defend himself, Abaddon howled in pain as Baltoh slashed him across the chest with his talons, tearing open his chest cavity and nearly snapping the ribs. He then delivered an organ-rupturing punch, sending the Demon skidding back fifty feet. Abaddon struggled to stay on his feet with inky blood dribbling from his wound, giving Baltoh the opportunity of a lifetime.

Baltoh reached out with his long tail and wrapped the tendril around Abaddon’s throat, strangling the Demon. He then turned around, swinging Abaddon like the head of a sledgehammer, and planted him in the floor with enough force to create a thirty-foot crater. He released the Demon’s throat, and as the beaten wretch slowly tried to get to his feet, Baltoh delivered a kick to the face, sending Abaddon flying through the air and crashing into the wall.

Baltoh pointed his sword at the Demon, about to deliver the final move. Dredging up his power levels for the attack that would obliterate his foe, he was suddenly interrupted by the sound of someone coming down the stairs.

‘What the Hell? This subway platform is closed, who is coming down here?’ he thought to himself, turning around.

His eyes widened and he released a deep gasp as Selene came into view. The beautiful woman stared at Baltoh, completely mesmerized by the sight of him and the undisputable proof that the events of the night before had really happened. She slowly walked towards him, clutching his feather and focusing on every detail of his body, from his tail to his burning halo.

“It’s you, it really is you,” she gasped with a shaky breath.

Baltoh turned to her and placed his hand on her shoulder. “Selene, what are you doing here? How did you find me?”

“The feather you left me, it began to glow and pointed in your direction. I knew I would find you if I followed it. Who ... who are you?! What are you?!”

“I’ll explain all of those later, I have to finish this battle now. Just please stand back and—”

“Look out!” she interrupted, drawing his attention back to Abaddon. The Demon was heavily wounded, but he was on his feet and had his finger pointed at them.

“Die traitor! Demon Art: Abyss Blast!” He roared.

All the rubble on the floor was thrown aside as a jet-black blast of shadow energy surged from his finger like an erupting volcano, focused into a dense beam with a ten-foot diameter and carrying enough power to cut down half of the city with ease.

Roaring at the top of his lungs, Baltoh swung his sword and used it as a transmitter to produce an energy field that deflected the attack. Going straight up, the blast burned a hole through the street and shot into the sky. Everyone in the street screamed in terror as it continued to rise like a geyser of oil, flying high above the tallest buildings in less than a second.

With the blast saturating the atmosphere with shadow energy, dark storm clouds began swirling around the black pillar. Down on the subway platform, Baltoh was pushing against the blast with his sword, desperately trying to stop it from firing upwards. If he tried shifting the angle of his sword and direct it in a different direction, the blast would slam down onto the city like a cleaver. In the blink of an eye it would take to change the direction of the blast, a huge scar could be carved straight through several miles of the city, possibly killing hundreds of people. This beam was far more powerful than a normal Demon’s!

After rising so high that no one could see it, the blast finally faded, growing thinner and thinner until it split off into just a few wispy beads of power. Baltoh blinked several times to readjust his sight and cursed when he saw that Abaddon had disappeared. He looked up at the hole burned in the street and the disappearing clouds.

“This won’t end well...”

“I can’t tell you how sorry I am for costing you the fight. If I hadn’t shown up, you could have beaten him,” Selene said, placing a cup of coffee on the island table for Baltoh.

He was leaning against the table with his wings retracted back into his body, in order to keep from accidently knocking things over. However, they were the only aspects of his appearance that he could change. His claws, tail, and burning halo could not be removed or hidden. Upon Selene’s commitment to finding answers, Baltoh had finally agreed to talk to her in her apartment, though he had to make himself invisible in order to get there without being noticed. Outside, the city of New York was like an overturned anthill as everyone who had seen or heard of the blast tried to figure out what it was. There were already dozens of news vans around the area of the eruption, held back by a line of police officers while anti-terrorism agents and forensic investigators studied the scene. Outside of the ring of crowds, Christian fundamentalists were already preaching that it was the end of the world and the blast was a signal that Judgment Day was at hand. However, after what had happened, no one could quite blame them.

“It’s fine, it was my fault. I should have killed him without any difficulty, but for some reason, I just couldn’t put my full effort into it. I gave him the opportunity to escape when I didn’t just skip the fight and finish him off. But it will take time for him to recover, and hopefully by the time he is strong enough to actually do anything, I’ll be able to track him down and finish the job,” he said coldly, ignoring the mug before him.

Selene leaned against the table, staring at Baltoh intently, trying to glean information from just his appearance. “Who are you?”

“My name is Baltoh, which is the Enochian word for ‘righteousness’.”

“But what are you? Are you an Angel... ?” she began, looking at his white-feathered wings.

“Or a monster?” she asked, moving her eyes down to the black scaly wings.

“I’m both; half Demon, half Archangel, more powerful than the two of them combined.”

Selene’s eyes widened at the very concept of such a reality. “How ... how does that even... ?”

“How does something like me even come to exist? That takes some explaining. In the entirety of existence, there are three realms; Heaven, this universe, and Hell. In Heaven there are the Angels and Archangels, on Earth there are humans, and in Hell there Gargoyles and Demons. Angels are deceased spirits that have sworn their allegiance to Jehovah to fight on his behalf against the forces of darkness, and Archangels are created by Jehovah himself or are the sum of multiple Angels bonded by their unquestionable desire to do good and fusing together into a superior being devoted to slaying evil.

In Hell, Gargoyles are malicious dark spirits that are born in the Lake of Fire through the anger and hatred of people on Earth. While they are completely devoid of actual souls, they are the shadow equivalence to Angels, but when an Angel falls from the grace of Heaven, it can become a Gargoyle with a soul. During events like wars or genocides, there is always a massive upsurge in the number of Gargoyles spawned from those negative feelings. However, in places on Earth with an unnaturally high level of pain and hatred in its history, very weak Gargoyles can form, while still being far more powerful than even the cruelest human spirit. Most often, when you think of demonic possession and demonic haunting, it is really just mere Gargoyles that are to blame.

Demons are on a whole other level of power from Gargoyles, with the difference being equal to the difference between Angels and Archangels. When souls are in Hell for a long enough period of time, they begin to ... decompose, as you might say. Their bodies and minds crumble into ash and they basically cease to exist as sentient beings. There are entire plains in Hell of black sand from the ashen remains of the bones of broken souls.

However, there is a special form of ash in that mixture, a part of the human soul that is ... heavier. It is the traces of evil that lie within every soul, the darkness that drives people to sin and commit crimes. Some have more evil in them than others and you know the results they bring. But like hydrogen gas coming together to form a star, the crushing weight of all the evil deeds and their weight will draw the heaviest particles of ash together and form a Demon, spawned completely from the malice of evil souls and lacking even a single human characteristic other than the desire to torment and destroy.” Baltoh explained with a haunting tone. Selene shuddered as she tried to fathom such an unholy creature and the darkness it would set loose.

“The other kind of Demon is a fallen Archangel, which means that its powers of light are converted into the powers of darkness and they become servants of the Devil. You can tell which Demons were originally Archangels created by Jehovah because they are much more calm and tempered, being of a single mind instead of a toxic mixture of hundreds of spirits.”

“So how do you fit into the picture?” Selene asked, resting her chin on her tented fingers.

“Demons are basically fallen Archangels, right? Well instead of being an Archangel that has fallen, I am a Demon that has risen,” Baltoh answered with more weight to his words than the declaration of a new world order.

“You mean you were originally a Demon?”

Even after all of the things she had seen Baltoh do, after hearing what a Demon truly was, she felt a great amount of fear towards the hybrid and took a step back.

“Originally, yes. I was born through a very different and unique mixtures of souls, specifically the souls of people who committed murder in the name of justice; police officers, Templar Knights, executioners, patriots, or even simple men killing the bastards that raped their wives or daughters. Jehovah doesn’t condone killing between humans, even if it is to slay evil.”

He was leaning against the table with his eyes downcast and hands balled so tightly into fists that blood oozed from his claws digging into his palms. Selene felt a deep chill in her heart as she heard the pain in Baltoh’s voice.

“I was once a legion of millions of people, tortured for eons by the minions of the Devil for bringing justice to the world through violence. We were heroes, yet we were cast aside and punished for our acts. Finally, when the amount of ash from crumbled heroes was so great that it dwarfed any other Demon’s genesis, I began to form from their hatred. But unlike Demons that form from the hatred of life and light, my hatred was directed towards evil itself. That desire to slay and kill the forces of darkness was so powerful that I was able to come alive from the pain and hatred of the discarded heroes. As far as I know, no Demon has ever been born from nearly as many souls as I have, meaning that my power was already unnaturally high.

I remember my birth clearly: opening my eyes for the first time deep below the ground of the ashen fields, coughing on the dark soil that filled my mouth and lungs, groaning against the crushing pressure on all sides. I remember climbing up through layer upon layer of decaying skeletons, becoming accustomed to my humanoid body and the Demon characteristics. I continued to tunnel through the ground, and just when I thought I would never escape my earthen tomb, my clawed hand broke through the surface and I managed to pull myself out.

Coughing and gagging, I climbed out onto the black fields of ash, breathing heavily for the first time. I looked up, seeing the flaming sky of Hell and the shifting dunes of the ash desert. I then looked at my hands and finally realized that I was a Demon. The second after the realization came, so did the passion and desires of all the human souls that made up my consciousness. The desire to destroy evil was so powerful, I felt like I was growing to throw up if I didn’t behead a beast of Hell right then and there, but there I was, a living Demon; the very symbol of darkness and evil. I was what I despised most.”

“So what happened next?”

Baltoh finally cracked a small smile and turned away from her. “I took my own life. Sitting in that black sand, filled with so much self-loathing that I could barely breath, I decided to end my existence right then and there. At least in my death, I could destroy evil and remove one threat from existence. Raising my hand, I straightened my fingers and plunged my claws into my own heart, ending my life.

Selene, never in the history of existence has a Demon ever committed suicide. By nature, they are too vain and too desperate to make others suffer to ever end their own life. Even while being tortured or cursed with ceaseless agony, they refuse to die in the hope that they can cause misery. But here I was, trying to eliminate my own existence to that I could at least destroy one piece of evil, even if it was myself. The fact that I was going against nature to such extremes is what allowed me to become what I am.

It was that act that did it; I remember it so clearly that it was as if it happened this morning. As my punctured heart came to a stop and the last flickers of undeath went out in my brain, there was a flash in my soul, brighter than a million suns. Through sin, I had achieved virtue, the same level of virtue that Angels needed to achieve to become Archangels.

Just as Christ was resurrected three days after his death, I was resurrected after mine. Holy energy flooded my body with the desire to destroy evil acting as the bridge between darkness and light, allowing for a synergistic balance that kept me from being destroyed by the transformation. With the power of both Heaven and Hell pulsing through my veins, I slowly got to my feet, transforming every second. I shed my scaly Demon skin for a humanoid body and flesh, grew the wings of an Angel above my Demon wings, and gained a halo of Hellfire, all while keeping my claws, tail, Demon wings, and the power of shadow energy.

I stood up with my new body, completely enlightened and worlds apart from Demons and Archangels in terms of strength and raw power. As I flexed my fingers, a Demon landed behind me, having come to investigate the bright light caused by my resurrection. Upon seeing me, the creature attacked ... poor beast. Completely driven by instinct and using less energy than to snap my fingers, I beheaded the Demon with the edge of my hand, moving so fast that he never even saw me.

From that point on, my war against the spawn of Hell began, and I spent the last several decades solely in the Demon and Gargoyle nurseries, slaughtering the unholy beasts the second they were spawned and fighting for every second of my life, appeasing my desire to slay evil and decimating the Devil’s armies.”

Selene was completely at awe at what she had just heard and struggled to think of something to ask or say. He she was, talking to the ultimate proof of faith.

“So if you’re half Demon and half Archangel, can you combine your powers?”

“No, I can only use them at the same time. I can mix them so that the two energies are blended to the point that they look almost like the hide of a zebra, but they forever remain separate forces, just like oil and water. It is impossible for Demon energy and Angel energy to bond, they are too opposite of each other.”

“So why are you here now?”

Baltoh turned back to her. “On the morning of the day I saved you, a Demon and several Gargoyles crossed over into this realm without being summoned. This is supposed to be impossible, as only the forces of Heaven have the ability to enter and exit all three plains of existence at will. I’m here to find out how they were able to do it, what they are doing here, and to slaughter them.”

“What do you mean ‘summoned’?” She asked.

“Gargoyles and Demons can only cross into this world from Hell if they are summoned through some act of human necromancy, like a bunch of goth kids performing a Satanic ritual. The process is actually very painful for any apparition that gets caught in it; it’s like bungee jumping from a satellite through the shaft of a volcano. I should know, I was actually caught in them a few times and pulled here against my will. The result is an apparition with significantly lowered power levels, so low that the only actions they can take are paranormal events like haunting the places where they were summoned. Given time, they become more and more powerful, eventually becoming strong enough to hurt humans and even leave the place they were summed to.

Every decade or so, the ones who perform such a ritual are skilled enough to actually summon a real Demon, and that’s when things get bad. A Gargoyle can possess and even kill people in an area, but Demons are able to create natural disasters and even plagues, like erupting volcanoes, earthquakes, and tsunamis.”

“So then does that mean exorcisms really work?” Selene asked, tilting her head to one side as she walked around the table towards the den. Baltoh followed her and they both sat on the couch.

“Yes, but not in the way you believe. The ritual of exorcism does not call the power of Jehovah to banish a Demon back to Hell, it is more like a summoning ritual for Angels, except that it only has to draw their attention, as Angels have the ability to pass through dimensional barriers. Consider yourself lucky that demonic entities are incapable of having that ability. When an exorcism is performed, it is a SOS to the forces in Heaven that you need help destroying a demonic entity or evil soul. Making their bodies invisible so that they can’t be seen, the Angels and even Archangels will arrive and battle the entity that is being exorcized, eventually destroying it once and for all.

Often times these battles can get extremely violent and destructive, so Angels answering the call of exorcisms always arrive in groups. One or more fights the entity or evil spirit, others cast a barrier that instantly repairs anything destroyed in the fight and hiding the events from outside viewers, and another to protect the ones performing the exorcism and anyone else in the area, always having to heal their wounds and alter their memories. Entire city blocks can be annihilated in one of these battles and people can be so badly wounded that they are brought to the brink of death. When that happens, the Angels will do everything in their power to avoid acknowledgement by the general public. They will wipe memories, rebuild anything destroyed, and even manipulate the media and Internet to destroy all reports or pictures of the incident.

When it comes to Demons vs. Archangels, the battles are waged using ancient spells and incantations that focus the respective energies of the two fighters. Being a hybrid, I can use both Heaven and Hell spells.”