The ALC set up base along the empty road, right across from the gate, as soon as the little creature brought him the bead lizard. Nick had known what it was immediately: a message. That Benji was still alive, that he was waiting for them. Across the street from this awful place, the place Nick had brought them back to, Erin yanks open the door of an abandoned florist shop to let in Sadaf.
Faith is okay. Erin is okay. That’s his job.
Nick allows himself four seconds to feel the trans bead lizard in his pocket, resting right next to his own—to center himself, to get his heartbeat back to where it needs to be. Two seconds to breathe in, two seconds to breathe out. Two seconds to pack Brother Clairborne into the deep part of his mind where he won’t come back; two seconds to reconcile the boy shivering against him with Seraph howling among monsters.
The four seconds end, and he snaps each thought off at the root and drowns them because if he doesn’t, he’ll melt down. Turns back to the bloodshed. Pulls the gun into his hands and goes through the gate.
Back to where the world is ending all over again.
One step into New Nazareth, and the crosses beside the gate are demolished in a screaming song of disintegrating wood. Nick stumbles back against the stairs, right inside the rough barrier. Twisted flesh and feathers shake off massive splinters, wailing with rage.
Benji. It’s Benji. The creature Faith was crying about is Benji.
Seraph—Benji—is terrifying in his beauty, in his brutality. That’s him? That’s the boy who wanted to kiss him, who promised to come home, who made him face the broken fucking thing the Angels had turned them both into?
Nick realizes, horrifically, that he adores that boy with every ounce of himself, in a way that refuses to be packed down and ignored like everything else, and that is why he slams his fist into the stairs to shatter his train of thought. He pulls himself back onto the wall.
He slides into place beside Aisha. She’s not going to last much longer. She looks like she’s going to break with every breath she takes. On the other side of the gate, on the other wall, Cormac and Salvador struggle to keep up with the swarm of Angels between them and Benji. This has to end soon, or they’re not going to make it. It’s up to Benji now—all the Watch has to do is make sure he survives long enough to break this place apart.
But that thing. That fucking thing.
Brother Clairborne, or what’s left of him.
The beast is a mockery of Benji, an unholy twin. It’s what happens when the Seraph strain tears through its host too quickly for it to possibly stay intact, so desperate for meat it feeds on the corpses littering the ground. The soldiers still alive choke on their own vomit and shatter under the weight of the virus lying dormant in their bodies. One topples in the middle of the road as his head comes apart into a mush of brain matter. Benji and the beast smash together, ripping flesh and snapping bone, until the beast grabs Benji by the wing and twists him to the ground. Benji screams and barely tears out of its grasp, scuttling backward with his wing held awkwardly like an injured bird.
The battlefield begins to change.
The first error, and Nick registers it as an error: a Grace turns for the stairs on the opposite side of the gate, the ones that lead right to Salvador, and snaps its teeth inches from xyr leg. Xe only barely manages to put a bullet in the soft tissue of its eye as Cormac drags xem back. The second: a twisted hand reaching up from the stairs—his side of the stairs, shit, he’s been too focused on the lawn, he hasn’t been watching his stairs—and sinks its claws into his thigh. The Angel it’s attached to wails, bloated skin marred with a too-wide mouth that explodes into gore.
Nick’s response is an instinct—pull the knife from his pocket, flick the blade out, strike. The first hit breaks the nose and the Angel screams, and Nick yanks it out and slams it back in. This time it hits the eye and goes right through to the brain. It pops, and liquid streams down his hand. The Angel convulses, claws digging deeper, before finally going limp.