Alexander Kakos stood with his back pressed against the wall of a small room aboard the Saint Christopher. With his arms crossed and eyes shut, the gentle back and forth movements of the freighter threatened to make him nod off. Again and again though, he reminded himself, he couldn't. The wicked young woman in the cell he guarded could torment him in his sleep. That was also why a second guard, the one with the key, waited right outside the door during the evening shift. Though it was forbidden, occasionally, to keep himself awake, he spoke to her.

"You're quieter than that impudent lesbian. I appreciate that."

Nijah knelt on her small mattress, faced away from him with her hands clasped in prayer and said nothing.

"Mecca is this way, you know." Alexander spoke with a sneer. He didn't even know what direction he gestured in, but he wanted to see if he could get a rise out of her. When Nijah didn't react, he glared in at her, his eyes fixed on the hijab that covered the back of her head. "I can't tell which of you I despise more. Whether I'd rather be stuck with a mouthy, committed nonbeliever or a silent, false Catholic."

Nijah's lips moved as she prayed, if he squinted, Alexander might have made out the words to a Hail Mary. She remained still and said nothing to the monk.

"My father was Greek Orthodox, but my mother from Sicily brought him further into the light," Alexander said. "I said my first penance when I was seven years old and took my first taste of the body and blood later that year, like my four brothers before me. I wasn't even the first called to holy orders."

After the pause for a response passed, Alexander opened his mouth again. Before he spoke, the ship took a sudden, violent shake. The monk stumbled; Nijah shifted only a little.

"Where do you think your parents are now then, hm?" Alexander said. "The ones who wrapped those ridiculous shawls around your head? They were cut from the same filthy cloth as brutal killers who have plagued the world since the days of the crusades."

Nijah paused in her mouth movements for just a moment, but only to perform a sign of the cross, then she lowered her head again. A gigantic, smash, reverberated through the Saint Christopher. Alexander shouted a curse as he lost his footing and, this time, Nijah slipped from her kneel and hit the floor.

"There! Not so firm in your convictions now, are you?"

A low chuckle started rumbling from the woman on the floor, and Alexander's body tensed.

"Don't you laugh at me, damn it—"

Another crash rocked the Saint Christopher. The emergency lights that faded into the ceiling of chambers across the boat sparked to life and flashed red, and a siren wailed from the deck of the ship. As she pushed herself up, with her laughter still rising, Nijah started to sing. "Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris. Quia non est alius."

Alexander ran up to her cell and smashed an open hand against the bars. "Quiet, girl! That song is not yours to sing." The ship shook again, and that was followed by a strange sensation. Or, little did Alexander realize, a ceasing of sensation.

The sneer across Nijah's face broadened. "Qui pugnet pro nobis. Nisi tu Deus noster. Fiat pax in virtute tua."

With another hit to rattle the bars, Alexander snarled at her. "My people sang that song as we killed yours, keep it out of your mouth—"

"Alexander!"

He whirled around. Alexander didn't recognize the other monk just outside the holding room, his shift must have just started. His companion was one of the crewmates from north Africa—Alexander could never pronounce their names, so he rarely bothered to learn them. Caught off guard by the interruption, he stood up straight. "What?"

"Can't you hear the siren, Brother?"

"Of course I can." Contempt slipped into Alexander's voice. "What is happening up there?"

"I haven't heard for sure yet. Something's gotten ahold of the Saint Christopher. Someone has—"

Nijah raised her voice practically to a shout as she sang, "Da pacem, Domine, in diebus nostris! Quia non est alius!"

Alexander whipped back around and roared, "Damn you, shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut—"

A second singing voice echoed down the metal hallway adjacent to the lockup. Even as the soft tenor travelled, it should have been too quiet to be heard over Alexander's ravings. In reply to Nijah, it sang, "Qui pugnet pro nobis. Nisi tu Deus noster."

Alexander and the other monk stared down the dark hall of the ship's underbelly as the haunting melody grew closer.

"Propter fratres meos et proximos meos. Loquebar pacem de te."

Nothing looked easily visible save for the flares of red from the flashing lights overhead. Alexander stepped toward the dark and shouted, "I'm warning you, we have the girl! And if you come out, we'll—"

A shape burst from the shadows before Alexander could finish his threat. For just an instant a tiny orange flame illuminated the darkness before it vanished and Alexander's companion screamed. A flaming dagger sat buried up to its hilt in his belly, and a thrust of great strength tossed him aside. Alexander only got in two steps backwards before the man from the darkness leapt toward him, grabbed him by his vestments, and rammed him against the cell.

Alexander sputtered, "Y—y—you!"

A smile purely without malice crossed Nijah's face. "Welcome, Khāl."

Kedar turned to her. "Are you safe, habibti?"

Nijah scoffed. "As if these fools could do anything but contain me. Yes, I am well."

Kedar nodded and leveled his glare back toward Alexander. "You're fortunate our arrangement with the Tannin dictates we do no real harm."

Alexander sputtered, "The—the what—"

Kedar threw Alexander aside, the monk groaned as he hit the floor. With a key Alexander didn't even see Kedar retrieve, he opened first the door of the cell, kicked aside the line of salt, then liberated Nijah from her manacles. With her wrists freed, the young woman wrapped her arms tight around her leader. Alexander pushed to his feet as they embraced, but after just a moment Kedar released her, rushed, and grabbed ahold of the monk by his vestments. Kedar asked Nijah, "Did he hurt you?"

"He only mocked me," she said. "He claimed I wasn't a true believer."

"Is that right?" Kedar slipped another blazing dagger from a holster on one of his boots and held it up to the monk's eye level. "March, whelp. And keep quiet."

With a hard swallow and a precise walk, Alexander led the two Nephilim out of the lower decks. As the splashes of waves against the immobile ship became audible again, something else did as well. A deep, throaty snarling from high above. Alexander's mind rushed for how to break free of the death march he proceeded on, but he knew he had no chance against the two creatures behind him. Maybe if he ran he could find support, he just had to slip away—

On the last floor before they reached the upper deck, bodies of Alexander's fellow monks laid splayed about on the ground. A dozen, maybe two dozen of them, laid facedown on the floor, and in the dark of the night that came in from the outside, it seemed none were moving.

From behind Alexander, Kedar called, "Gallagher! Are they ready?"

Alexander refocused ahead of him where a thin, wrinkled, white-haired man he'd never seen before in a priest's robe stood waiting.

"Yes, sir, they are ready to depart." The priest spoke with a lilted Irish accent. When he noticed the horrified way Alexander looked about at the bodies on the floor, he said, "They're only sleeping, you know."

The monk balked. "What? Why would they be—"

"Old Gaelic magic. See for yourself. Let him look, Kedar, he deserves to know."

Kedar held his steps. Though he said nothing, that may as well have been a stubborn command of, "Fine." Alexander stepped over to one of the lifeless bodies on the floor and knelt. After a few seconds with his stomach threatening to disgorge, he caught sight of a few deep, sleeping breaths from one of his crewmates.

"All right, you've seen." Kedar stepped forward again. "Now prepare to behold the power and the glory." Just after he said it, came another deep, throaty snarl from overhead.

As Kedar closed the distance between them, Alexander started to march again. At that point, maybe he could shout, maybe he could scream and wake up all his inexplicably unconscious crewmates. But then he may well feel the burn of the dagger in his back. And, as much as it made his heart sink with dread, there was some small part of him that needed to know how they'd successfully captured the ship. He passed the priest called Gallagher and, with Kedar and Nijah just behind him, ascended the stairs.

On either side, the Saint Christopher sat held in place by the wrapped bodies of two titanic abominations. Out from the sea, with enough length to touch the bottom and anchor the ship, stood two creatures like enormous snakes with five heads each. Four heads like crocodiles formed like the points of diamonds around a central face with the weathered, wrinkled complexion of an ancient sea hag. As soon as Alexander stepped aboard the deck, all ten heads leered down at him and the ten horrible visages uttered another series of glutaral snarls.

Alexander did not scream and he did not run. Faced with such impossible horrors, he just slipped into unconsciousness and fell to the floor like the rest of his crewmates.

Gallagher chuckled and looked back toward Nijah as he stepped onto the deck. "The cetus wouldn't have hurt him, you know. I had to promise them we would do no lasting bodily harm before they brought us this far."

Nijah smirked toward the old man. "And they just take your word for it?"

"On the one hand, I am of the fae, and I cannot lie," Gallagher said. "And on the other, I am a priest, a man of the lord. They, in turn, are creatures of the lord, it is in their nature to obey when I speak their language."

She nodded and turned to Kedar. "I know where the icon is. Let's go get it."

The older man frowned, turned to her, and laid a hand on her shoulder. "I have already endangered you all too much. And the rest of you will be at your weakest within the Vatican's walls."

Nijah crossed her arms and looked away. "So, they made it?"

"Joaquin reported when they reached Rome, and I'm certain if he had them he'd have followed up with me." Kedar released her shoulder, then raised a hand to her cheek. "All of you have done everything you could so far, sweet habibti, but it is now on me to take back my birthright."

Nijah went silent for a few seconds, her eyes still turned away from Kedar. When next she spoke, their bodies slowly began to dissipate from reality. "No. I can still do one more think for you. I know what happened to the icon. And I know who you have to take it back from."

Kedar's eyes widened with interest as she spoke, but her words and, a moment later, their forms, slipped from all intelligibility.

-000-

Sadie awoke with a dry throat and cold sweat running sticking her to her bed. After a moment to process, a shudder ran through her body.

"Oh God, no. No."

The icon within her hand revealed significant moments of the past, but just how long in the past was that one? The sky over the sea was dark. It could have been seconds, minutes, or hours. Whatever it was, the true enemy suddenly, without question, knew to hunt for her.

She rose from bed, threw on the last of Stephanie's clean clothes from her backpack, and opened the single-room apartment's door. Right outside, standing straight as a statue, was Beat the Swiss guard, another down the hall stood at Cassandra's door.

"Miss?" Beat asked.

"We're not safe up here," she said. "Kedar's coming for me."

"Calm down, what now?"

Sadie raised her left hand and flashed the green crystal in her palm. "This thing just showed me. He knows it's here, and he knows it's a part of me."

Beat hesitated and looked back and forth between her face and the icon within her palm. Before he drew a conclusion for how to respond, a buzzing sound reverberated off his arm, its echo down the hall followed seconds later. The guard at Sadie's door rolled up his sleeve, beneath the poofy arms of his uniform sat another herald. Whatever he saw on its tiny screen convinced him, Beat turned to his companion down the hall and called, "We need to get them into hiding, wake the lover."

Sadie's cheeks reddened as the other guard knocked on the door to wake Cassandra. "What'd you call her?"

Beat frowned and turned back to her. "That is what you two are, isn't it?"

"I, uh, yeah. Yep." Sadie scratched the back of her head. "Guess I just appreciate one of you guys putting it that way."

It took less than a minute for the second door to open and Cassandra to step out. She let out a yawn, but as soon as she saw the stern look on her guard's face, she walked swiftly to Sadie's side. "What's going on?"

"I saw another vision," Sadie said. "Kedar was on that boat, he just busted Nijah out, and now—"

Even dampened by the walls of the compound, all four heard and froze at the sound of a gunshot from outside. Cassandra looked to Sadie and said, "Give me another minute. Want my uniform for this."