Feathers Can Bite

Beneath St. Mary's Cathedral, a shriek of metal tore through three hundred years of dust and silence.

Morris waved forward the three operatives behind him, their faces lost in the shadows of black tactical cloaks.

The Court of Shadows' highest clearance had let him slip like a ghost past every modern security system in the church. This ancient door, cast from iron and lead, yielded only to brute force.

Flashlight beams cut through the narrow passage. The air reeked of rotten wood and wet soil.

They descended deeper and deeper until they reached an unremarkable concrete wall.

"This is it," Morris said, his voice strangely muffled in the enclosed space.

He had pieced together clues from Gray Tongue's fevered ramblings to identify the final location.

One operative stepped up. A mechanical exoskeleton on his right arm hummed, and its five fingers became spinning drills that cut precisely through the concrete.

Dust billowed. A mural deliberately walled away three centuries earlier came back into view.

Morris focused his flashlight and felt his pupils contract.

Seven towering humanoid beings stood around an ancient altar in the painting. Their stances differed, yet every one radiated a pure, crushing authority of judgment beyond gods or demons.

Strangest of all, someone had savagely scraped away the face of the sixth being from the left, leaving only a blurred outline resembling a black wing.

"Photograph it," Morris ordered calmly.

The moment an operative raised a high-resolution tactical camera and pressed the shutter, something changed.

Thick liquid like molten gold began seeping without warning from the broken seam in the concrete.

It glowed faintly and crept toward the nearest operative as though alive.

He had no time to react. The liquid merely touched the edge of his tactical boot, and his whole body convulsed as if struck by a high-voltage current. He crashed to the floor.

His shadowed face covering slipped away. Agony twisted his features, his eyes rolled back, and a few indistinct syllables escaped his lips.

Morris bent at once, bringing an ear close to the man's mouth.

"The sixth... sequence... has awakened..."

Before he could say more, the battle-hardened Court of Shadows operative died.

Almost simultaneously, the live feed from Morris's miniature camera flickered into violent static in the fortress command center, then went entirely black.

In his tower on Gotham's sea cliff, Gideon stared at the final frozen frame on the holographic screen: the face someone had scraped away, with only the outline of a black feather left behind.

Without thinking, he reached toward his back.

At the roots of his fallen wings, old wounds long since healed began to ache so deeply it felt as though his bones were splitting.

As if something forgotten were about to tear its way out.

Rain fell in sheets through Gotham's night, washing over its sins.

In St. Mary's abandoned cellar, a flash of lightning revealed a shabby figure in a trench coat with a cigarette between his lips.

John Constantine kicked open a scorched door without ceremony. Half a bottle of whiskey swayed in his hand as he addressed the ruined altar and apparently empty room. "Hey, big guy. Heard you haven't been sleeping well."

He blew out the last of his smoke. Its rings twisted into ghostly faces in the damp air.

"Keep dreaming you've got four arms and you're sitting on a throne of lava, watching stars live and die? Don't worry. It isn't the start of a psychotic break."

With an irreverent grin, Constantine pulled an ancient roll of parchment from inside his coat. Its edges were charred and smelled of sulfur.

"It's your ancestors knocking at the door."

Gideon emerged silently from the shadows. His cold gaze settled on Constantine and the fragment in his hand.

Constantine ignored it and spread the damaged page on a dusty stone table.

Written in a language older than cuneiform, it contained a staggering secret: a fragment of The Creation of the Seven Sequences.

"At the beginning of creation, seven 'primeval judgment vessels' were forged out of chaos," Constantine translated with studied flippancy, pointing to the words. "Their only purpose was absolute, merciless cleansing on a cosmic scale. But their power was too pure for any will to control or any 'civilization' to understand. So the first six prototypes were sealed, exiled, and even... destroyed."

His finger came to rest at the fragment's end. "Only the 'gentlest' seventh, altered and weakened over and over, became the source of the concept of judgment in the civilizations of the gods. In other words, the forefather of that bureaucracy up on your heavenly mountain."

Constantine looked up at Gideon with mocking eyes. "They call you a fallen angel? Come on, mate."

"You're no angel at all." He chuckled, dropping the words like a bomb. "You're a rejected prototype. One they were supposed to destroy."

Gideon remained silent a long time, his deep eyes betraying nothing.

He raised a hand slowly. Silent black flame lit his fingertip, ready to reduce both the ridiculous scroll and the noisy man before him to ash.

Then something uncanny happened.

The instant his flame touched the parchment, it went out as though it had met its natural enemy.

Worse, the ancient writing stirred. Character after character floated into the air, turning and arranging itself before Gideon into a complex, flawless... diagram of a DNA helix.

At the same instant, the miniature communicator in Gideon's ear sounded. An encrypted report from Dr. Rachel Vaughn, Morris's leading geneticist, came through urgently. She could barely contain her shock.

"Sir... the sample comparison is complete. Your genetic sequence shares an unknown chromosome with Diana Prince, Wonder Woman. It... it belongs to no known divine lineage. Not Olympus, not Asgard, not even Apokolips..."

Gideon clenched his fist.

An old wound in his palm split open. A drop of bright blood struck the stone beneath his feet.

Instead of spreading, it crawled across the slab and extended into a complex, ancient ritual pattern identical to the one in the three-hundred-year-old mural.

His body and blood were instinctively, unconsciously reproducing that long-lost "awakening rite."

The next morning, old Samuel, the church's elderly gravekeeper, hobbled into the underground archive, now cordoned off by police.

Evading notice, he went to the inside wall of a ventilation shaft. He broke the skin of his withered palm with a fingernail and struggled to write a line in his own blood:

"You are the first to awaken."

Then he sat down peacefully and swallowed the poison hidden in a tooth.

When the police found him, his body knelt in an unnatural position facing north, toward Gideon's tower on the sea cliff.

That night, in the cellar of another abandoned Gotham monastery, a one-eyed monk named Lucian Moreno led twelve masked priests in blood-red vestments through the true bloodline resonance rite.

"Let a holy martyr's blood be the lure, and a lost son's bones the key!"

A pale bone shard in Moreno's right eye socket suddenly burned hot. He shouted in fanatic triumph and drove a blood-soaked dagger into the center of the formation.

Countless scarlet runes lit up across the black stone floor. Like a giant spiderweb they raced along the spiritual channels beneath Gotham and locked onto the figure in the sea-cliff tower.

"Found you... vessel!" Moreno laughed wildly. "Sacrifice you, and my lord, the true god of the sixth sequence, will return through your body!"

An irresistible wave of unseen energy crossed the intervening space in an instant and struck Gideon.

In the tower, he stiffened. His limbs felt suddenly filled with mercury, impossibly heavy.

A terrible force deep in his blood tried to wrench his consciousness away. His soul felt as though it were being torn bodily free to make room for something older and far greater.

At the last possible moment, Gideon acted.

He bit down hard on the tip of his tongue. Pain and the taste of iron burst through his mouth.

Instead of spraying his enemy, he spat a mouthful of blood infused with his fallen essence backward onto his own battered wings.

Hiss!

Feathers could bite.

The black wings that symbolized exile and disgrace came alive at the touch of his blood.

Their countless fibers multiplied and spread like bursting blood vessels, coiling over the walls, blanketing the ceiling, entering cracks in the floor, and reaching down through the whole tower.

At the tip of each fiber, an almost invisible glow winked like the probe of a nerve ending.

A moment later, the feeds of countless surveillance cameras and electronic devices across the block, and even half of Gotham, rushed into Gideon's mind in billions of streams.

Thirty-seven assassins hid in the surrounding buildings. Their heartbeats, breathing, weapon models, firing angles—everything appeared in his thoughts with perfect clarity.

"Hah."

A cold laugh rose from deep in Gideon's throat.

He ignored those insects and took a step. He vanished, only to reappear kilometers away with his hand around Lucian Moreno's throat.

"You called me a vessel?" Gideon brought his face close to the horrified monk's. He had just ripped memories of the fear and despair of dying from the souls of the twelve priests. Now he drove those memories brutally into Moreno's mind.

"Then learn what it feels like when tens of millions of dead souls take possession of your body."

"No! No!" Clutching his head, the monk screamed. He saw the agony of the fanatics he had sacrificed for the ritual. "Stop! I don't want to watch them die! I don't want..."

They were the sheep he had driven into the abyss with his own hands.

The fight ended almost as soon as it began.

Gideon let go, and the body whose mind had completely collapsed slumped to the ground.

He cut off a piece of the altered feather that still pulsed faintly as though alive and sealed it inside a lead tube.

"I almost wish I were only a fallen angel," he murmured, with a weariness and uncertainty he did not recognize in himself. "At least then I'd know who I am."

Outside, the rain that had lasted all night finally stopped.

A newborn feather, blacker and purer than the night, drifted out of the tower window. A slight breeze lifted it as it spun, carrying it toward distant Themyscira rather than any corner of Gotham.

At dawn, a cleaner named Maya Hernandez yawned, carrying a bucket and mop into the cellar where tragedy had struck the previous night. The air still smelled of blood and sulfur.

As she prepared to scrub the stairs as usual, she glanced at the cracks between the stone steps.