Seraphim watched as her ‘rescuer’ went about making himself comfortable. This consisted of him loosening his boots, lying down, stretching out, and putting his thick fingers beneath his head and falling quiet after closing his eyes. She watched him do so, unmoving, and barely a sound coming from him but his breathing. She frowned a little and looked down at her injured leg, the round that tore through and through was long gone, but what he said about the cursed rounds was still lingering in her mind.

‘Theresan curses… how can the people of I Am have gone so far…?’ She wondered about that, and had no answers, what mattered was that they’d done so, and the proof of it was still slow in healing. With nothing else to do, she lay on the cot and stretched out her legs the way Gabriel did on the dirt floor of their hideaway. ‘Trust him, huh… an angel trusting a human should be easy, but after all this time…?’

He didn’t seem like he was giving her much in the way of options, however. ‘If I keep pushing, maybe he’ll leave me to my fate… I could fight off a few more jets, but how many of those cursed rounds or, what did he say those other tubes were… missiles, could I take before they brought me down and took me back. Back to another room like that? No. No. Never that.’ Seraphim told herself and stared up at the dirt ceiling in their little underground hideaway. She swallowed hard and pursed her lips tight, she still watched him out of the corner of her eye.

He seemed asleep, but it was hard to say, his body moved as if it were sleeping, with just a rising and falling chest and nothing more. How he could sleep so soon after everything, that was a real mystery.

She put her hand to her head and her wings burst out of her back and wrapped around her body, the soft touch of her long feathers was a comfort to her skin, and after looking around the walls of earth until she was utterly bored, she lay down on the cot and closed her eyes. She pulled the microfiber blanket over her, it didn’t completely cover her body, but it did feel good. She nestled herself against it and set her back to the wall so that she was facing the opposite end where her rescuer slept as soundly as if his house and life hadn’t burned down to the ground only hours before.

Her eyes drifted closed at last, and sleep was all she knew until she felt his hand on her shoulder.

Seraphim’s eyes flew open. ‘A human snuck up on me?!’ She opened her mouth to speak and deny the possibility of the reality his hand was forcing her to confront.

But before she could utter a word she saw his face, he was crouching down in as nonthreatening a way as possible, one finger over his lips, he made a small ‘shushing’ noise, tapped his ear, and then pointed outside.

That’s when her ears caught it.

“Why come all this way?” Someone asked, “The wilderness goes nowhere! Not for hundreds of miles!”

“Where better to hide? Can you imagine trying to get a satellite view of hundreds of miles of wild forest? They’re probably wasting their time watching cities.” Seraphim looked at Gabriel with idle curiosity, in her captivity, when she slept, even the slightest noise woke her, and not even within the room beyond her cell, just the noise of those coming her way from the hall beyond.

‘Is he really human?’ She wondered. She could feel the tension in his body as he mouthed words to himself and reached to his side. He undid the snap over the sheath at his belt and drew out a blade.

The knife was an unfamiliar design, with an undulating handguard that curved up on the dull side and down on the blade side. The knife itself was almost closer to a short sword, but with a tiny tip that sloped on one side before coming to the straight edge, the base of which had a few metal saw ‘teeth’.

Unfamiliar design or not, so close to it, she felt the raw, preternatural violence from the blade. ‘A mystic weapon of some sort, I’m sure of it.’ Seraphim told herself, his eyes were no longer on her, they were on the entrance.

The noise of walking stopped close to the entrance of their hideaway. “Think about it, they could go out a few hundred miles, hole up in a cave, and we’d never find them. The angel could probably carry him even if he weren’t strong enough.”

“Maybe, but that just means we should have sent more.” The voice outside answered, it carried an edge with it, a nervous, youthful edge.

“You’d say that if we sent a hundred, or a thousand, or ten thousand. Listen, the guy has been out of the game for a long time, he’s not going to be that big a threat. The only reason we need more people is to cover more area, and the big hat doesn’t think the wilderness is all that likely.” He sounded disaffected, unhappy with the decision, and Gabriel’s heart rate slowed down.

“I don’t like it.” The nervous voice retorted.

“Neither do I. But they didn’t ask me.” The voices became more distant as the hunters began to walk away.

Gabriel turned his head slightly to look at Sarah. “Stay.” He mouthed the word, and she nodded.

‘So this runs higher than I thought. That’s a problem, that’s a big problem. Fuck. My. Life.’ He thought as he crept for the exit. ‘If il Vaticano is giving direction, then she’s more important to them than I thought…’ Gabriel didn’t look behind him, but the mystery in his mind, deepened.

He felt her pale eyes on his back as he left the shelter.

The backs of the hunters were far, far away. ‘They’ve already figured out who I was… that’s a problem too. I suppose it makes sense. If il Vaticano is involved, they’d have fairly unlimited resources to put into this. Turning weeks into hours wouldn’t be impossible.’

He moved with the silence of unmoving air, the grass refused to cry out, the leaves refused to stir, the tall trees ceased to sway, and ahead of him the two black clad scouts were oblivious.

Their innocence struck a small pang in Gabriel’s mind, they were walking around looking for ‘him’ not for ‘signs of him’. They weren’t checking for broken twigs or bent grass, and though they were dressed for the outdoors with good boots and pants tucked into the tops, they were clearly novices.

Despite the fact that they had good tactical vests and carried both a rifle and pistol each, they had none of it out and ready. As Gabriel crept closer, keeping his eyes looking past them so they wouldn’t get the feel of the Evil Eye and realize they were being watched, he saw that they were young, perhaps in their twenties. The knot of pity went tighter.

‘At least they’re not accompanied by hellhounds, these must have broken off from the main team. They must have an inexperienced leader too.’ It was a small blessing.

Ten feet from them and still undetected, he watched as they raised their walkie-talkies and said, “Team six checking in. No sighting.”

“Keep at it.” The garbled voice came in, and when the sound cut off, before the walkie-talkies were even stored again, Gabriel rushed in.

He shoved the bowie knife that the Sword of Mars had reshaped itself into, straight into the back of the man on the left. It pierced his lung, killing even the possibility of a scream.

The companion to the already dying hunter had at least some combat training or instincts, and he thrust his hand toward his waiting pistol while trying to leap backward.

Gabriel however, drew out his knife and let the dying body fall and before the hasty, fumbling hand could close on the pistol grip, the knife flashed out across the hunter’s throat.

Crimson spurted out and the beardless young man staggered back, the spray of blood indicated inevitable death, but the wild eyes of the youth indicated the part Gabriel hated. The knowledge of inevitable death. He ceased to reach for his pistol, instead the hunter’s hands came up to his throat and struggled to staunch the flow of blood.

Gabriel stood there for a moment as the young man collapsed, strength fleeing the dying body, he gurgled pointless things. “We know who you are. We’ll find you. You’ll never be safe, Urial Cane. Never.”

Gabriel ignored the dying words, shrugging with indifference until the failed attempt at avoiding death was over, and only a corpse lay where a man once stood.

Instead he looked down at the first one to taste the Sword of Mars in its newest incarnation. “You’re still alive?” Gabriel asked and crouched down, he grabbed the shoulder of his prey and flipped him over onto his back.

The dying man was gasping for breath, he would not last long, that was clear. “I don’t enjoy suffering, so I’ll make this quick.” Gabriel clasped the young man’s hand as if to shake it. “Squeeze the number of teams that are in the nearest city, and your pain stops.”

The young man’s eyes widened, his lips mouthed ‘Hurts’. Hurts. Hurts.’

“I know it does.” Gabriel said with a fatherly, gentle voice, “Just tell me what I want to know, and I’ll make the pain stop. Right now your lungs are collapsing, they’re like big balloons in your body, and I ripped one apart, you’re as good as dead, even if you were airlifted to a hospital now, there’s nothing they could do. You’d die on the way. The only question is how long it will hurt for.”

Gabriel watched the young man’s will break under the pain, his hand began to squeeze, the pressure was weak, but it was present. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven… the number went up to twelve.

‘That’s a lot.’ Gabriel had the dry thought and then he released the young man’s hand, allowing it to flop down. He then covered the eyes of his victim and brought the blade down into the dying man’s brain. The body spasmed once and fell limp.

Gabriel drew the blade back out and wiped it clean on the clothing of his victim. He then went through their pockets one after the other, they carried wallets with their names, and predictably, cash. Plenty of it. “Thank you.” He said to the dead, they didn’t answer back. He folded the bills of each man together into his pocket, then checked their weapons. The pistol rounds were a match to his own, so Gabriel pocketed those as well, but it was evident that there was nothing else after only a few seconds of patting their limp bodies down for anything more. Just a few field rations, plastic wrapped chewy energy bars to be thrown into his own pockets and that was that.

Before leaving, there was one more thing to do. He searched around, his eyes darting hither and thither until he caught sight of a flower blooming out of a dead tree. He went to the fallen giant and brought his lips close to the bright red circle of petals and whispered to it, “Cernunnos of the forest… il Vaticano intrudes. They take from greed, not from need. Punish them to aid the enemy of your enemies…”

He didn’t wait for an answer, that wasn’t how forest spirits were. Instead he hastened back to the hideaway where Sarah would be waiting for him.

She was sitting up when he returned. “Time to go. We’ve got a few hours, and if that worked then they’ll watch the city less closely for a while, I hope they enjoy hiking in the woods.” Gabriel chuckled a little and couldn’t refrain from a cocky smirk.

“What did you do?” Seraphim asked him.

“Walk.” He said, “Just a few steps, tell me how it feels.” He added as he brushed past her over to the boxes of food.

She did as he said, walking back and forth without evident difficulty.

He watched out of the corner of his eye as he cut the brown box open and tore out a few brown containers, he shoved one into each of the cargo pockets of his pants, then tossed two to her. Seraphim caught them and without prompting, imitated his gesture.

He then stuffed their backpacks to bursting and said, “Good, you can walk, it’s not long until nightfall, if the Theresans haven’t changed their operation methods, and I doubt they have… they don’t like change much, then the next check in will be two hours. By that time, we’ll be long gone, and they’ll be looking in the wrong place.”

“Those men, you killed them, didn’t you?” He nodded at Sarah’s question.

“And passed their identity on to the forest spirits, if Cernunnos remembers my voice, he will have wolves or bears take their bodies a long, long way from here in the next two hours. That should mean they shuffle teams away from the city. Why? Is that a problem?” Gabriel asked, flinging on his backpack and heading for the exit.

“I-I guess not. I killed the two men in the iron birds, the jets. But-” Seraphim’s answer was cut off.

“Good, then there’s no time for talking, only for walking, there’s a creek not far from here that feeds into the river, if nothing has happened to it, I should have a hidden inflatable there, we can shave a few hours if we can take the river while they’re not looking, and be in the city before morning.” Gabriel said and breezed out the door.

Seraphim followed, leaving the hidden place behind without a backward glance.