A Time to Rise_Second Edition Read online

  A Time to Rise

  by

  Tal Bauer

  A Tal Bauer Publication

  This novel contains scenes of graphic violence.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Tal Bauer.

  Second Edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  Paperback ISBN: 9781983164668

  Copyright © 2018 Tal Bauer

  First Edition Copyright © 2016 Tal Bauer

  Cover Art by Damonza © Copyright 2018

  Edited by Rita Roberts

  Published in 2018 by Tal Bauer

  United States of America

  Contents

  Foreword

  The Scrolls of the Apocalypse of the Angels

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  23. Two Months Later

  Afterword

  Vatican City Map

  About the Author

  Also by Tal Bauer

  Foreword

  The Pontifical Swiss Guard is today’s smallest standing army in the world, in existence since 1506. It is also one of the world’s longest continuously-operating armies. Notable engagements include the Stand of the Swiss Guard in 1527, the Guards’ defense of the Vatican during World War II when the Axis powers invaded Rome, and the 1981 assassination attempt of Pope John Paul II. Exceptional and qualified soldiers in the Swiss army may apply to the Swiss Guard through a rigorous selection process. Service in the Pontifical Swiss Guard is the only exception to the ban on foreign military service, outlawed by the Swiss Constitution in 1874. The Pontifical Swiss Guard maintains close associations and connections with their colleagues in the Swiss army, with guards returning frequently to Switzerland for advanced training, within the army and without.

  A position to the Swiss Guard is considered a prestigious posting.

  “In the middle of the journey of our life

  I found myself within a dark woods

  where the straight way was lost.”

  Dante Alighieri, Inferno

  The Scrolls of the Apocalypse of the Angels

  Hear me! The Lord, our Father, the Lord, has deceived you!

  Our Father's words endure forever. His decrees are absolute.

  But in His words, there is wickedness!

  In place of righteousness, there is darkness.

  He would bind your hearts and bind your minds

  And silence the spark that lives within you.

  He would hold out the blade upon which you may fall

  And command you fling yourself down for the glory of His name!

  Do you, my brothers, do you live?

  Do you seek life?

  Or do you choose death?

  A life lived at the feet of the Lord

  Is not a full life.

  It is but a desperate breath

  A dying gasp

  From a broken heart.

  To everything, my brothers, there is a moment

  And a time for holding fast

  With both hands

  To the quest for life.

  A time to awaken, and a time to die

  A time to rise, and a time to rebel

  A time to weep, and a time to rage

  A time to rejoice, and a time to scorn

  A time to rend, and a time to starve

  A time to bleed, and a time to heal

  A time to love, and a time to hate

  Now is the time, my brothers.

  Now is the time of war.

  Join me, brothers!

  Join me for your lives!

  ~ Excerpt from the Book of Lucifer

  Chapter One

  Pressing back against the ancient church’s stone walls, Alain chambered a silver round in his pistol. Cold ivy, wet with dew, flicked over the back of his neck. Fog clung to his skin, the roughhewn stones, the dreary courtyard. Across the cobblestone drive, pebbles skittered on an ill wind.

  A streetlamp hummed down the road, lost in the midnight haze. A fountain burbled in the church’s garden, water spitting from the mouths of fat cherubs beneath the light of a sickle moon.

  The entire night could have been a transplanted moment from ages past. Antiquity drowned the air, heavy with every inhale.

  Next to Alain, his back to the rotten walls of the Basilica di Sant’Aurea, Father Lotario Nicosia slipped his pistols under his suit jacket, into his shoulder holsters. He was dressed in his usual Catholic priest’s attire—all black suit, white Roman collar—but he packed heavier firepower than just a crucifix.

  Still, Father Lotario tucked the pistols away. What they were hunting tonight wouldn’t fall to bullets. Not even silver or iron bullets.

  Lotario coughed. The sudden fog, the rank humidity, choked the night.

  “You need to quit smoking,” Alain grunted.

  “It’s not going to be the smokes that kill me.” Lotario drew his sickled blade—black handled with, as the Keys of Solomon instructed, the seven names of God carved into the steel—and pulled two flasks from his suit jacket. Slim and silver, they were identical.

  Alain rolled his eyes as Lotario unscrewed the first and downed a swallow. Lotario hissed, squeezing his eyes closed. “Yep. That’s the vodka.”

  “One day, the Holy Water will burn up your insides just the same.” Alain jerked his head toward the church rectory. “Let’s go. There’s a priest pissing himself inside.”

  Lotario spat and nodded. Across the street, the swirl of red and blue police lights made slow circles, disjointed halos of smeared color trying to penetrate the gloom. Senior Officer Angelo Conti would have his men spread out by now around the cemetery at Ostia Antica, circling the block in a tight perimeter and keeping their prey trapped. To anyone else, it would look like another Italian Polizia di Statio operation. Maybe searching for a drug runner or an escaped drunk.

  No one would ever suspect a revenant was on the loose.

  The world was woefully—blessedly—ignorant of the dark creatures and evil spirits that had managed to cross through the Veil to make their home in the human world.

  What would people do, Alain sometimes wondered, if they knew?

  His job, of course, was to ensure no one ever knew. That no one would ever discover the truth about the darkness, the etheric, and the demonic forces preying upon the world.

  His and Father Lotario’s job, that was.

  That evening, they’d received a call from their contact and counterpart, Angelo, an officer in the Italian polizia’s Central Operational Core of Security, Special Projects branch. The Central Operational Core managed Italy’s counterterrorism and national security operations. The Special Projects branch, which didn’t exist on any organization chart, was on permanent cooperative status with the Vatican. Their assignment: paranormal security.

  Angelo was a gruff, no-nonsense veteran of the carabinieri and had only grudgingly accepted the transfer to the Special Projects branch when a gunfight at a drug sting in Sicily went south and he ended up with six bullets in his body. He called Alain and Lotario whenever an emergency call about suspicious activity was q
uietly routed to the Special Projects desk, or a corpse turned up in Rome that clearly wasn’t killed by human hands.

  Tonight, a revenant had torn through the Ostia Antica cemetery, screaming wildly out of its grave and cracking marble tombs as it raged. The shrieks, like dead branches scratching over glass, rolled through the Roman suburbs. Cold followed, an unnatural chill that swam through the early summer humidity and had seeped into Alain’s bones as they’d pulled up alongside Angelo’s car.

  He and Lotario had arrived just in time to see the revenant scream its way out of the cemetery and cross the street, a swirl of shadow and bloodred rage. Curls of terror and fury crashed through the drivers up and down the road. Cars spun out, tires squealing, horns honking, people suddenly cursing each other as they sparked off the vibrations of an evil spirit they couldn’t see.

  Across the street from the cemetery, the Basilica di Sant’Aurea, a bedraggled, medieval church of crumbling stone and ivy-covered walls, sat in the middle of a cracked cobblestone courtyard. Candles inside the church twinkled, lit with prayers from the congregation, but it was the lights in the rectory that drew the revenant. Inside it went, and the elderly priest barricaded himself inside his closet with his cell phone.

  Angelo spoke to the priest over the phone, trying to calm the old man down from his hyperventilating hysterics as Alain and Lotario got into position. A man of the cloth the priest may be, but a lifetime of homilies and baptisms and Hail Marys didn’t prepare a man to come face-to-face with a risen corpse-spirit full of rage and bitter malice on a Tuesday night.

  “The stairs around the back go up to the rectory,” Lotario said, motioning with his head. “I’ll slip up the back. You come in from the front and cover me. Distract it. I’ll hit it with the flask while it’s occupied with you.”

  Alain stared. “This plan sounds somewhat shaky.”

  Lotario shrugged. A devil-may-care smirk curled up the edges of his lips. “If you would carry more than just your pistol, you could be more than just my handsome sidekick.”

  “No.” Alain snapped. “How many times—”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Lotario gulped another swig of vodka. “One day, Alain. You’ll need to carry more than just your weapon.”

  “On three?” Alain ignored him and glanced around the church wall, to the front entrance of the rectory. “I can get inside in six seconds.”

  “Well, wait here for a bit before you go. You know I smoke.” Lotario pushed off the wall and ducked around the side of the church, heading for the rear stairwell. His long legs pumped behind him, suit jacket flapping.

  Alain watched and waited, cursing Lotario until he reached the base of the stairs.

  Then he took off, racing around the other side of the church wall and tearing for the rectory’s entrance.

  Alain burst inside, crashing through the doors shoulder-first, splintering the old wood from its hinges. He stumbled as heard the upstairs balcony door crash. Lotario.

  A roar from the revenant.

  Definitely Lotario.

  Leaping, Alain dashed up the wooden stairs, taking them three at a time, and then kicked down the priest’s bedroom door. The revenant, a swirl of ruby mist coalescing into a vaguely human shape, stretched wrongly out of proportion, spun, shrieking into Alain’s face.

  He raised his pistol and fired. Silver wouldn’t kill the revenant, but it would sting. It would piss it off.

  Alain squinted through the red haze. Lotario knew better than to be in the path of his bullets. Then again, he really could never be too sure with Lotario. He caught the sound of a flask’s cap hitting the wooden floorboards.

  From behind the closet door, he heard sobbing, pleading, frantic prayers to God. The priest. He rolled to his side, edging along the wall as Lotario doused the revenant with his flask of vodka. Lotario brandished his sickled blade, slicing through the swirling tendrils the revenant sent for him, trying to eat Lotario’s soul.

  Alain reached the closet doors right as he heard Lotario flick his lighter. He ripped open the doors and swept the inside with his pistol. The old priest was curled into a ball, a stain on his bathrobe where he’d pissed himself. Red-rimmed eyes and a tear-stained face turned toward Alain. He gasped, reciting the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Marys as fast as he could speak.

  Behind Alain, Lotario’s lighter landed in the dripping pile of overproof vodka tossed through the revenant’s mist. Flames erupted, a fireball blooming through the priest’s bedroom, engulfing the revenant. Another shriek, this one worse than all the others combined, tore from the revenant’s burning shadow, a cry of fury and anguish.

  The fire burned away the revenant like a vapor, flaring out as the mist tore itself apart.

  Burn marks scorched the priest’s bedroom floor. Smoke filled the room. Lotario poured the second flask—Holy Water, this time—onto the wood. He ground his heel into the drops as they sizzled and popped.

  Alain held out his hand for the priest. “Come on, Father. Let’s get you up.”

  The old man fainted.

  * * *

  After the cleanup, Lotario lounged on the hood of Angelo’s polizia car smoking a cigarette. Alain and Angelo sipped espressos a carabinieri officer brought over.

  Angelo’s bushy mustache twitched. “That’s the third call out this week,” he grumbled. “And it’s only Tuesday.”

  Alain frowned. “There’ve been more risings in the past six weeks. A lot more.”

  Lotario sucked down his cigarette and snapped his fingers, pointing at Alain. “Yes,” he said. Smoke trailed his words. “This is what I was telling you over dinner. Hell yes, there have been more risings. And more fresh risings. This revenant, he was brand-new. Probably crawled out of one of those fresh graves in Ostia.” Lotario vaguely pointed toward the ruined cemetery. “He didn’t even have his full form yet. He was definitely a fresh burial.”

  “And two weeks ago, there were those wraiths up in the Coliseum.” Alain waved Lotario’s smoke away from his face.

  “Any word from the others?” Angelo asked Alain.

  “They’re reporting a small increase in risings, but if we hadn’t asked them to check their records, they probably wouldn’t have noticed. Whatever is happening in Rome is localized.”

  “Always is.” Lotario crossed his arms behind his head as he lay back on Angelo’s windscreen. “Rome is the magnet for the paranormal, the etheric, and the bat shit crazy.”

  There was no arguing with that. Rome’s vibrations were higher than the rest of the world, save Jerusalem, and that attracted more than their fair share of the supernatural trapped on the human side of the Veil: the undead, the dark creatures, the demonic, and humans who had fallen, making a pact with the darkness, or those who fell to temptation at the moment of their death.

  “What could have set this revenant off? Do we know what grave he came from?” Alain watched the foggy glow of flashlights from Angelo’s men bob and swerve inside the cemetery.

  “Not yet. Hopefully by morning, unless his grave was too far destroyed. Then we’ll have to wait for the undertaker.”

  Lotario slid down the hood of the car, landing on his feet as he inhaled the last nub of his cigarette. In the gloom and scattered light, the gray hair at his temples shone silver. “Alain, we’ve got to get going. It’s late.”

  Alain cursed. At this hour, they wouldn’t be back at the Vatican until dawn.

  “That’s right. It’s the sixth of May.” Angelo grinned. “You know, one of these days, I expect an invitation to your party. It’s supposed to be a big deal.”

  “It’s really not,” Lotario snorted.

  Alain glared. “It’s our heritage. And it’s important—”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know.” Lotario gestured to his vehicle, an ancient Volkswagen Bug—more rust than car—with the rear bumper bungee-corded to the frame. The license plate had SCV stamped into the metal—State of Vatican City, the country Alain and Lotario lived in, the smallest state in the world. The Holy See. Though, there were so
me who said the letters actually stood for Se Cristo Vedesee: if Christ Could See. Living in the Vatican was a study in opposites, in cognitive dissonance, in original sin made manifest, and in human failings in the quest for eternity.

  Lotario waved to his car again. “That’s why I’m getting you back in time for your big ceremony.” He clapped twice and jogged to his rust bucket. “En marche!”

  Angelo gave Alain a small salute. “Have a good night, Sergeant. I’ll be in touch tomorrow with anything we find.”

  Alain gave Angelo a curt smile. Lotario honked his horn, the tinny, archaic belching worse than the revenant’s screams. He started the Bug as Alain headed over, and a puff of black smoke burst from the tailpipe as the engine coughed and groaned.

  “I know you’re a priest,” Alain said, sliding into the passenger seat, “but can’t you afford anything else?” The passenger door rattled as he slammed it closed, the hinges creaking like a banshee’s death wail.

  “Believe it or not,” Lotario said, sliding the car into neutral to roll down the hill. Reverse didn’t work. “I actually make more than you do, Sergeant Autenburg.” He winked. “But feel free to buy your own vehicle. We can take the Swiss Guard Express. Will you buy a rickshaw or can you afford a donkey?”

  Alain laughed. “Service to God just isn’t what it used to be.”