Sinners and Saints

by Jennifer Roberson

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  As I drove out Highway 89, I wanted badly to shout that it wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right, it just shouldn’t be happening because Remi and I had been to Sunset Crater before and had cleared the domicile. No more demons allowed; in a way it was a secular version of holy ground. I had sensed something there as I drove by that night after we’d cleared the Native American ruins at Wupatki, and we had discovered a black dog as we climbed the side of the ruddy-hued cinder cone.

  We’d killed that black dog, we’d exploded it. We’d done the rite as Greg, of all people, of all angels, had shown us at Wupatki, when she’d blown up the body of a black dog who’d been murdering humans. Remi had killed it with blessed rifle bullets, but we hadn’t known what to do with the body. Within thirty minutes we’d killed a second black dog at Sunset Crater and made the cone all nice and shiny and safe again. No demons could return to it. So how was the Ripper demon holding Remi at Sunset Crater?

  In the photo, Remi didn’t appear to have been seriously harmed. Maybe the Ripper had taken his knife to another portion of Remi’s body, maybe fingers, as he’d shorn Mary Jane Kelly’s hair, but Remi’s face and hair were intact, and his expression—eyes open and lucid—had been stoic, not like he was hiding pain.

  He’d said rodeo cowboys were tough, and in general tended their own injuries without much said about them, often avoiding professional medical care altogether. So possibly he was hurt. But my primogenitura hadn’t twitched. My link to Remi had not indicated injury, and it had before.

  Then I muttered between my teeth, “Don’t do that. Don’t do that.”

  I shut down my brain the next few miles, until the big cinder cone rose high and close on my right: black and bloody-red, lower slopes studded with dusty green vegetation. The cone edges up top broke inward into a true crater hollowed down toward the original volcanic vent. Officials had stopped allowing visitors to climb the cone because of erosion.

  Before, Remi and I had stopped along the highway, then hiked in to the cone along the lava flow. This time I took the normal turnoff to the loop road into the monument. I rolled up to the gate, discovered a sign explaining Sunset Crater was closed due to earthquake activity.

  Huh. Yeah. I remembered the demon possessing the entomologist professor had said something about one of the trails being damaged by the first morning quake, that it had collapsed into a cave. And there had been another quake since then. Remi and I had been at the chapel with Cassandra and Greg clear on the far side of the Peaks for the second one, and I hadn’t thought to look up information on secondary earthquake damage at the crater. No reason to.

  Well, till now.

  Sitting on my bike, engine idling, my entrance blocked by steel, I pulled up the iAngel phone and Googled for news. What I found was pretty much what the sign said: The monument was temporarily closed to visitors until all damage could be further investigated. Details were sparse, probably because they didn’t want lookie-loos sneaking in. Naturally such declarations meant nothing to demons.

  However, I had an angel phone, and Remi had an angel phone, and probably we had angelic GPS. I smiled, then arrived at the obvious conclusion and the expression dropped away.

  Probably the demon had taken Remi’s magic phone, may even have texted me on it as Remi, and very likely would use the GPS feature to track mine, so he’d have us both.

  I drove off the main visitor road, rolled slowly down the fenceline until I found vegetation that would shield the bike against a casual look-see. I climbed off, checked all my pockets for additional breath-blessed bullets and shells, checked the KA-BAR, the Bowie, checked the Taurus Judge in the holster beneath my left arm.

  I had nothing else. I couldn’t smite anyone, demon, angel, or human. I had weapons that could be taken away from me. The only thing I held in reserve was something kindled in me years ago as a kid, the day I had taken my brother’s pain for my own. Grandaddy had called it the stewardship of the younger. My brother Matty had stood proxy for Remi that day, until the night at the Zoo when Remi and I had clasped hands, touched rings, and sealed ourselves to the battle by blood and bone, life and limb.

  Primogenitura.

  I left the bike, worked my way through the 3-strand fence—I didn’t have Remi’s nippers to cut the wire, or I’d have taken the bike in farther—and began walking the road’s shoulder. It ended in a parking lot, and the trailhead was clearly marked.

  I turned off the Location setting on the phone, pulled the SD and SIM cards, tucked them away in a hidden pocket but kept the phone in an obvious place on my person.

  So, okay. If I was found, they’d take a non-working phone from me. I’d still have the guts and a way to contact Grandaddy if he deigned to answer—or even Greg if I inserted the Cassandra drive—using someone else’s phone, if I could get my hands on one.

  I traded asphalt for soil and cinders, started hiking in.

  * * *

  —

  The cinder-heavy soil was broken by ancient lava, hardened into blackened and shirred folds, squared blocks, and jagged protrusions. The trail in places led over strands of lava, or ran beside it like a cartpath on a golf course. Tumbled piles reached knee level, or higher. There was no kindness about it, no rain-and-sun-softened stone. Here lay the bones of the earth, built of petrified lava. But here, too, were trees, copses of piñon and ponderosa pines, quaking aspen, where cinders and ash freshened the earth to grow again. At one stand of aspen I stepped off the trail, closed my eyes and let myself go. Let myself reach out:

  I want Remiel. I need Remiel. Beta to my alpha. The man, the soldier, to whom I was sealed for the brotherhood of battle. I can lift the pain from him, renew his body, renew his soul.

  It was a stewardship, not a selfish rite of passage that gave all to the older and left out the younger. Not in the ways of heaven.

  Remi sensed demons in human hosts. He was likely imprisoned by demons now, at the very least by one demon more powerful than others. Among them, or kept in the company of Jack the Ripper, Iñigo Montoya, Legion—whatever it wished to call itself—he might be able to sense one strand of what is clean about the world, the purity of the earth and all its many parts. He might be able to find the me in the strand and follow it until he was close enough to tell me where he was and how I could find him.

  In the midst of quaking trees and green-coin leaves, in the shadow of a volcano, I extended my senses again, reached again, requested willing guidance.

  I extended, I reached, I requested . . . and felt needle-like pain enter my right eye. When in the interior of my skull it exited the eye, it entered the brain proper as an Improvised Explosive Device.

  * * *

  —

  I’d experienced migraine headaches maybe six times in my entire life. Enough times to know just how bad they can be, but so far apart that it was easy not only to forget just how excruciating they are but also to forget to stock up on any kind of migraine-specific medications to keep around. Aspirin, ibuprofen, NSAIDs were all I’d ever taken, and I had none on me. I’d swallowed two ibu tablets not long before I left, but there was not enough oomph in them to counteract this degree of head pain.

  Flashing lights, a watery aura, nausea. Involuntary tears poured from that eye. I found myself kneeling on the ground trying to keep down the last meal I’d eaten, right hand clamped over eye, cheek, and brow while the braced left hand and arm kept me from doing a face-plant.

  Migraine pain can reduce an adult to infancy, begging internally for someone, anyone, to bring relief. Even for a parent when you’re two years short of thirty. I didn’t beg for that, but if the pain continued, I might.

  I breathed hard and hoarsely until I feared it might worsen matters. Then I breathed very, very quietly. I wanted badly to fool the world into believing I wasn’t present, so that the pain couldn’t find me.

  Of course it already had. But the goal was
to find time to control the current discomfort before the world added more.

  Finally I gave up and just lay face down in the grass, dirt, and cinder ash, folding arms over the back of my head to block out sunlight. Little by slowly, I felt the pain begin to recede. Seconds feel like hours when pain is involved.

  I bent an arm and slipped it between my chin and the ground, so I wasn’t puffing dirt with my breaths and sucking in ash. “Okay, could have done without this experience.” I lifted my head, felt the pupil in my right eye contract sharply. Grass rustled at eye level.

  I pushed myself up into a sitting position, thought over what had happened. The trigger, I was certain, was when I reached out for Remi, or for something that could indicate Remi’s location. Which meant possibly it wasn’t happenstance, but an actual intentional block.

  “Okay, then.” I got up unsteadily, brushed off my leathers, closed my right eye as I peered across the vista. The relief from migraine pain left me repeatedly thanking whatever power was responsible.

  So. Maybe the trick was not to engage my sensitivity until I really had no other choice. I was counting on the organic GPS of primogenitura. It hadn’t entered my mind that instead of giving me an edge, it would be an impediment.

  I felt a little fragile as I got back on the trail. Migraine pain took the legs out from under a person, and while everyone could empathize with a broken limb, even if only in the imagination, a headache surely was not so debilitating as to interfere with actual activities.

  Sunglasses. I should have brought sunglasses. Because my right eye was squinting against daylight. Hat with a bill on the front. Maybe even a cowboy hat.

  Well, no. People would expect me to like country music if I wore a cowboy hat.

  I toiled along the trail, keeping my head bent as much as I could without cutting off the view of where my feet needed to go, blocking the glare with a raised hand. And then, after a tight turn down into a narrow portion of the trail, wending its way through clusters and bends of lava, I came up to an area marked by yellow caution tape and highway construction barricades.

  Yup, the trail stopped abruptly, tipped down into a giant hole. Looked like a massive animal had bitten out mouthfuls of the earth. Perhaps twenty yards on the trail picked up again. But in the meantime, as I made my careful way around the perimeter of the tape, I saw the chasm in the earth. Felt an actual chill. The earth was breathing here, but in the midst of hardened lava, the dragon in the earth’s core, the breath was markedly cool.

  Beyond the tape and barricades, about twenty-five yards along, I saw a metal post. At its top was fastened a metal plate, tilted. A trail marker of some kind, or a sign providing tourist information. I skirted the tape, climbed up on piled lava to avoid the collapsed trail, made my way around to the post and plate.

  My eyebrows rose. Seemed an odd cognitive dissonance: a massive lava flow, and in the midst was a large lava tube now tagged an ice cave because the interior was cold enough to maintain some winter ice through summer.

  The sign also announced that while visitors were once allowed inside the cave, it had been closed for years, sealed by iron grillwork.

  Not anymore. The grill was a twisted remnant, more crude sculpture than serviceable barrier broken out from cement and stonework. The cave now gaped open, hemmed in by freshly broken rock and static stone formations, but open to the sky.

  I made a visual examination of the immediate area of the ruined grill, because a fair number of rocks were loose. The corrosion of the earth, broken up by two earthquakes, funneled the remains down from the higher point of the trail. The earth and stone forming a roof over the cave entrance had not been broken apart, but held up part of the lava flow as well as other boulders. No sign remained to provide information on how large the cave was when it had been closed, or where the lava tube collapsed under the earth’s surface to form a finite cavern rather than continuing tunnel-like access deeper into the ground.

  Maybe I had pulled the SD card a little too quickly. It would have been helpful to Google the monument and pull up photos of the original entrance and cave, see what it looked like before being blocked by the iron grill. But I wasn’t going to slip the card back into the phone now, not here.

  Because, face it, an old cave with a formerly blocked entrance in the midst of an ancient lava flow from a 900-year-old volcano made a really effective lair.

  Maybe even a prison for one Remi McCue.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  I made a rather clumsy trip down from the blocked off trail to the cave entrance, trying to avoid loose rocks. The cave wasn’t a vertical hole, so if I lost my balance I’d merely fall down flat, not disappear into the depths of the earth. But if I was a fantasy hero setting off to rescue my battle buddy bestie—provided I wasn’t the kind of Hollywood hero who was forced to lose his battle buddy bestie to death for emotional motivation—it would be helpful were I to arrive whole.

  At the cave opening, beside the twisted grill, I unholstered my revolver, closed the grips into the palms, examined the sight atop the barrel. Shemyazaz had tossed the gun hard away from me and it had struck a parquet floor. Revolvers were difficult to seriously damage—you could chip the hammer, a grip, maybe—and unlike some semi-autos they did not discharge on impact. But the sight could be damaged, which would affect one’s aim.

  I couldn’t be sure. A migraine can affect visual acuity for a while, and it was possible the gun sight could be slightly off. Short of shooting it now, I couldn’t know, and that was not going to happen. In the midst of conflict one shot would provide the information I needed, and I’d have four loaded chambers left to get my business done. But five would be better.

  The entrance was low and I ducked my way in, but once past it the cave expanded. Not much room, and a lot of tumbled stone. But if the lava tube beyond the entrance chamber had once been blocked, occasioning closure, it wasn’t impassible any longer.

  Sunlight still reached the cave proper. Once I ducked down and climbed over rubble into the actual lava tube, sunlight would at some point cut off, unless there were cracks in the ceiling. Which I’d rather there were not.

  I lacked my regular phone with its flashlight app, and the angel phone didn’t have that app, but without cards in it for now it didn’t matter.

  But who needs flashlight apps when he has an actual flashlight? “Not such a dummy,” I muttered, pulling the mini Maglite from a pocket. “At least, not always.”

  About ten yards beyond the remains of the blockade, still gathering some sunlight from the cave entrance, the tube expanded into a cavernous avenue. Astonished, I stood inside a natural volcanic structure that resembled a huge manmade tunnel. You could drive an eighteen-wheeler through the middle of the thing and still not risk rubbing sidewalls or ceiling.

  Lair, indeed.

  Alas, the tube did not maintain that initial size and shape as I hiked. At points the ceiling lowered—or perhaps the ground rose—the sides closed in, and rubble choked certain areas, though it remained passable. Sunlight was long gone, but in the absence of all light, in the pressure of utter blackness, the Maglite, though small, was highly effective.

  The tube went on and on, driving through the earth. I could see it doubling as a highway for the great sandworms of Frank Herbert’s Dune, burrowing beneath seas of sand.

  When I reached the first tube split, I stopped. The eternal debate, at a fork in the road, in a maze, concerning which way to turn. Left, right, up, down. Flip a coin. Draw straws. Rely on instinct.

  I drew in a long breath, sat down on stone and ash, crossed my legs with bent knees extended, bootsoles facing sideways. The split was precise, like a Y. I placed myself at the head of the stem, facing both offshoot tubes. The flashlight lit up the Y—and told me nothing.

  I set the Maglite in my lap, scraped up pebbles and ash in both hands, closed my fingers. It was cool, verging on cold, in the tube. I was th
ankful for my leathers.

  I took another breath, closed my eyes. I couldn’t be tentative. I had to let myself go, to risk it. Let my senses drive through the tubes as lava once had.

  Black/black/black.

  Bright red/dark red/brown red.

  Orange so brilliant it blinded.

  Brown/tan/silver, pink, and olivine.

  Ash over it all, and the sheen of metal in edges, the clean steel of knife or sword, the blued metal of gun or damascened whorls.

  ‘We live between the grays,’ Greg had said. ‘We live between the black and the white.’

  It came in on a rush and knocked me flat, a torrent of here/here/here.

  And also, ‘Hic sunt dracones.’

  It made me smile. No question that it was Remi.

  I rose.

  I threw down the ash and stone.

  I took the right-hand tube, thinking, ‘Here be dragons.’

  * * *

  —

  Pain came, of course. It pierced, then dove into the eye, thrust through, exploded inside my skull. It knocked me down, it knocked me flat, it knocked me over the edge to the cusp of unconsciousness.

  Hammer on spike.

  Spike/spike/spike.

  Here be dragons.

  Hic sunt dracones.

  No.

  Hic sunt daemones, laired beneath the earth in a chamber carved by magma, by the earth’s blood climbing up through vessels, through veins, making tubes and vents and pipes as it released gases and ash.

  The cinder cone under which I lay was partly made of iron. And also partly sulfur.

  Hammer/hammer/hammer of the spike through the eye, through the brain, and out the other side.

  * * *

  —

  I got up again. I walked again. I staggered, I tripped, I fell.