Hurry

“Would it be annoying of me to ask you to hurry?” Cody asked, his tone tight and more than a little sarcastic.

Kyle knelt at the base of the wall, scribbling Hebrew letters as fast as he could, murmuring the ward incantations under his breath. Elise was curled around her guitar in the other corner; she was too tense to even play. Marsh was watching the entire proceedings, mouth set in a thin line. He had a pair of dice in one hand and was rattling them, but he hadn’t thrown them yet.

All four of their angels were wheeling high overhead in the beams and buttresses of the cathedral like so many carrion birds.

“Hurry up, please,” Cody said.

“I’m almost there.”

Cody watched the seconds tick by on the face of his very expensive wristwatch. “Yes, well, the Choir of the Fallen gave us a deadline, and we have eighty-seven more seconds to meet it.”

“If you’d let me work, I could get this done,” Kyle said, “and then we’ll meet it.”

Cody forced himself to take a deep breath and step away from the wall. The government was insane if it thought it could control the fallen. The geological record was scarred with ice ages and volcanoes, earth-shattering cataclysms because more than on idiot had thought he could control the powers of darkness.

Then Kyle said, “There,” and sat back, wiped his hand theatrically across his brow. He grinned up at Cody. “That should keep them out.”

Marsh and Elise wilted in relief.

And then there came a pounding at the double doors, like someone had taken a battering ram to them, and Agent Samuels said,

“Open up! This is the FBI!”

“So much for those wards,” Cody muttered.

The four angels came swooping down to the ground.

(303 words)