Grim Tidings

by Caitlin Kittredge

  I swayed, and dropped the glass. Seeing him sent all the blood out of my head, and Leo rushed across the room to catch me as I fell, both of us going to our knees.

  “You’re not real,” I sobbed, trying to fight him. “You’re not going to make me say yes.”

  “Ava!” Leo grabbed me by the shoulders, then pulled me to him, pressing me against his chest. His shirt smelled like aftershave and cigarettes, and like it had been on his body at least two days longer than it should have been. He felt warm, and strong, and I sobbed hysterically, my whole body shaking. It was a trick. It had to be. It was all a trick of Cain, to make me think I’d escaped when I hadn’t.

  “You got out,” Leo whispered. “It wasn’t easy, taking down those barrier spells, but you got out. You ran before we could get to you.”

  “You’re not here,” I whimpered, but Leo just held me tighter.

  “The conjuring will work its way out of your system in a few hours,” he whispered. “Do you trust me?”

  I couldn’t even respond anymore. I was so cold I couldn’t feel my limbs and I shook like I’d just been tossed into a frozen lake.

  Leo lifted my hand, unwrapping the cut on my palm, and touched the bloody spot. With the blood on his finger, he pressed it to my forehead, murmuring. I felt his spell settle over me like a blanket, warm and prickly, but the frantic churning of thoughts in my head quieted, and with it, my body stopped shaking.

  “Leo,” I managed, looking up at him. He looked so tired, even paler than usual, his face drawn tight. He hadn’t shaved, or combed his hair, and he had a small moon-shaped cut healing at one side of his mouth.

  “Yeah, it’s me,” he said, relief relaxing the tightness in his jaw.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, starting to cry again. It was like a floodgate in me—I couldn’t close it. “I left you alone. I should have protected you . . .”

  “I’m fine,” he said. “All I cared about was getting here once I knew you were in trouble.”

  “You found me,” I choked out, going limp. Something Leo had said before, when I was still convinced this was a fever dream, suddenly flicked back into being. “No, you said ‘we’ . . .”

  “If you’re going to complain about how long it took,” Uriel said, “understand that I can’t just snap my fingers and break magic as powerful as Cain’s.” He stood in the door, his arms folded. “But I do owe you an apology. I underestimated his desire to keep you near him.”

  I looked back at Leo. “You . . . and him . . .”

  Leo nodded. “We got here as fast as we could. I’m just sorry it wasn’t sooner.”

  The glance he traded with Uriel confirmed my worst fear. “If Uriel went to you to help me . . .” I breathed. “Oh, shit.”

  “You and I have a long talk ahead of us,” Leo said, pulling me to my feet. Uriel rushed in, shocking the hell out of me, and took my other arm, supporting me like I was his feeble old grandma and we were on our way to church.

  “I’m sorry . . .” I whimpered, but Leo cut me off.

  “Not until you’re strong enough.”

  “It wasn’t her fault,” Uriel said, surprising me again. He was going to have to quit that. My heart couldn’t take it with the state I was in. “I ordered her to . . .”

  “You stay out of this,” Leo said, and his voice was colder than the prairie blizzard outside. None of the Leo I knew, who could be warm and even funny. This was the Grim Reaper, Death himself, speaking to an angel who’d trod all over his territory.

  “Don’t be cruel to her,” Uriel said before he let go of me at Leo’s car. “She’s had enough of that in her lifetime.”

  He was gone when I looked up, and Leo and I were alone. “Get in,” he said, helping me into the front seat and buckling my seat belt. I looked up at his face, which wasn’t angry or cold but simply blank, careful not to give away what he was thinking.

  “Where are we going?” I said, thinking it was pretty much the only inoffensive question I could ask. Leo slammed my door and got in the driver’s seat.

  “Far the hell away from here.”

  We didn’t speak for many miles down the highway, but this time it wasn’t the comfortable silence I could endure.

  I peered out the windshield as we pulled up in front of a lot of blinking neon and last-ditch drunks stumbling out into the dawn. “What is this?”

  “Indian casino,” Leo said. “My dad used to have meetings here sometimes with the godfather from Denver. Neutral ground and all that.”

  I tried to climb out of the car but my legs were shaking too badly. “Leo . . .” I tried again, but he just held me up as we crossed the parking lot and through the smoky lobby and got into an elevator.

  “Wait,” he said. “Until we’re alone.”

  The hotel room was the nicest I’d seen in decades, but I couldn’t appreciate it. “I need to wash up,” I told Leo, aware that my skin was itchy in the way you get when you haven’t showered in a few weeks too long. Now that we were alone, I would have done anything to avoid the conversation we had to have.

  “Ava . . .” he started, but I flipped on the bathroom light.

  “Oh Lord,” I breathed as I saw my reflection. I looked dead. My cheeks were hollow and my skin was streaked with dirt. My hair hung in stiff, greasy chunks. I pressed my hands over my eyes, and my stomach growled in response.

  “When was the last time you ate?” Leo said quietly, coming behind me to help me strip out of my filthy jacket and overshirt.

  “I don’t remember,” I said. “I guess if you’re immortal you don’t think about stuff like food and water. Or need to bathe.”

  Leo turned on the shower hot and helped me get undressed the rest of the way. “I’ll order you some food,” he said. “I don’t know if we can salvage these clothes.”

  “Burn them,” I said, getting in the shower and sitting down, pulling my legs up to my chest.

  Leo went out and while he was gone the bathroom filled with steam. I sat for a long time watching black water slowly turn clear again as I washed layers of grime off my body.

  “How long was I down there?” I said when the door opened again.

  “Couple weeks,” Leo said. “Angel boy came fluttering around, freaking out because he couldn’t find you and one thing lead to another.”

  I shut off the water and stood up stiffly. Leo wrapped me in a towel and helped me to the bed. He’d ordered a rare steak and stood by the window while I ate it, watching the pink halo of neon flash below us on the marquee.

  I set down my knife and fork when I was done, and looked at him. “I didn’t want to lie to you.”

  “Then why did you?” His shoulders were a perfectly straight line, drawn taut as a rope.

  “I . . .” I felt sick, the food a knot in my guts. “I couldn’t tell you what was happening. Uriel said if I did he’d . . . he’d make things very bad for both of us.”

  “You could have told me anything,” Leo said. “Anything in this world and it wouldn’t have mattered. I could have accepted it and we could have moved on. But to keep something like this from me? That you’re on the Kingdom’s payroll?”

  I shut my eyes tight, almost hoping that I’d wake up inside one of Cain’s nightmares, back in the silo.

  “I am so sorry,” I said finally. “But that was before, when I didn’t know what was going to happen with us. I didn’t think you’d be very happy.”

  “That you’re a bounty hunter turning in Fallen scalps?” Leo growled. “God fucking dammit, Ava! Out of all the shit that happened to us, this is the one piece you should have told me!” He swept the room service tray off the bed, shattering dishes and sending the silverware flying. I curled into myself, shaking.

  “You know what the worst part is?” Leo said after a long time. His voice was far away, and he had his back to me again as he stood on the other side of the room. “I needed you. These past weeks. It’s not getting any better with the other reapers and I really needed you. But you couldn’t be straight wi
th me. You couldn’t let me help you. You think so little of yourself, so little of me and what we have that you willingly go with the Walking Man and leave me choking on your dust.”

  I opened my eyes at that, sitting up. “Willing? You think I put myself through that again on purpose?”

  “Why else?” Leo snapped. “Because it sure wasn’t to kill the Fallen. It wasn’t to get rid of Cain. You must have a reason that you don’t care to share with me, Ava, because normally you’re a lot smarter than this.”

  “Fuck you, Leo,” I said, jumping up from the bed and dropping my towel. A bag from the hotel boutique sat on the side table and I dumped out the new set of underwear, jeans, bra, and shirt, yanking the tags off.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Leo demanded as I wriggled into the outfit. It hung on me, and I could see my hip bones sticking through my flesh. If Leo could look at me and think I’d gone through this of my own accord, then he could go piss on a live wire.

  “Anywhere you aren’t,” I said, grabbing up his overcoat from the chair by the door. “Because if all you can do is whine about how I was shacked up with Cain after what you’ve seen, then you have your head so far up your ass there’s nothing I can do to help you.”

  “Ava, don’t walk away from me!” Leo thundered as I opened the door.

  “Go order around somebody who gives a shit,” I said. “I’m not your bitch.”

  He didn’t have anything to say to that, and I let the slamming door end our conversation.

  I boosted a no-frills granny coupe from the edge of the long-term parking lot, screaming onto the highway before security or the cops could catch up with me. I stopped to swap the plates once, but I kept driving until I got to the hospital that was both closest to the town we’d been in and the nearest to the quarantine zone. Hank wasn’t there, and I tried six more hospitals before I finally found him.

  At least Valley had held up her end of that bargain. Hank was in the ICU, and I glanced at his chart because the nurses were way too busy to notice me, even if I wasn’t hard to spot. He had an infection, his kidneys were beat up from it, and he’d lost enough blood to be in a coma. But his eyes fluttered when I came up to his head, and he gave me a weak smile.

  “I know I should thank you,” he said. “But all I can think is that I used to be right-handed, and you chopped off my fucking arm.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, putting a hand on his forehead. He sighed, then frowned a little.

  “Why are you so sad?” he asked.

  “You got a couple days?” I said. Hank laughed.

  “I’ll be okay. I might even get out of here with the rest of me still working if I can kick out this infection.”

  “You know, I should be pissed at you too,” I said. “You walked me right into a trap.”

  Hank mumbled something, but he was drifting off and I leaned close. “What?”

  “He said ‘now you know what you need to kill the Walking Man,’” a voice said from behind me. Uriel leaned against the door frame, devoid of his usual company-man smirk.

  “You have some goddamn nerve,” I told the angel. Hank moaned a little in his sleep but morphine could apparently block out even angelic visitations. Lucky bastard. “He was never in Tartarus,” I said. “You knew and you sent me anyway because that’s just how it works for me. How the world sees me.”

  I’d never felt like it was really the end before. When I’d been tempted to give up, something kept driving me forward. It was the hound. It was trying to survive even when I’d been tempted to throw in the towel. But now I was free, and the hound had no reason to stick around.

  Uriel clenched his jaw and then visibly made himself relax. He stood tense and awkward, like he didn’t know what to do with himself, which was a first. “I did know,” he said at length, like the words were being yanked from him with pliers. “I knew he was never in Tartarus. And I knew it wasn’t as simple as bringing in an immortal serial killer who liked to spread chaos.”

  He gestured toward the highway beyond Hank’s window, choked with Humvees and emergency relief trucks. “But I didn’t know about this. This was not my doing.” He relaxed again, and I realized that was what Uriel looked like when he told the truth. “I am fighting a war, Ava. I would never sacrifice a good soldier on something as petty as a fugitive hunt.” He took my arm, pulling me to my feet. “I wasn’t after the Walking Man.”

  “Cain,” I said. “Let’s just call him what he is. Even if he isn’t the guy from the story he’s definitely an original son of a bitch.”

  “Cain is a rabid dog,” Uriel said. “I’m after the person pulling his leash.”

  “You are so stupid,” I said. “All of you, in the Kingdom, looking down on the rest of us. Like we’re vermin to you. Things like Cain don’t have a leash, not really. They can’t be reined in.”

  “Sure they can,” Uriel said mildly. “You just have to find a bigger, meaner dog to do it.” He folded his arms. “Did you learn anything in your time with him?”

  “Other than that he’d spent sixty years in a silo and he was ending the world in a plague of zompires?” I thought back to Cain’s implacable speech, as if he’d been anticipating the telling of my fate for the whole stretch of decades since the tornado swept him away. “He fixed me a lot of tea. Oh, and he told me I was made for him and that eventually I would willingly submit to being his companion until the end of days.”

  Uriel looked out at the highway as a green Humvee rolled by. “We should go,” he said. “There’s too much of a chance the Fallen are out there and neither of us needs to run into any of them right now.”

  “There is no ‘we’ anymore,” I said. “I’m going to go beg Leo to forgive me, and if he takes me back I’m not leaving his side again. I’m going to get as far away from the start of the end of the world as possible.” I started to walk out, but Uriel’s cold voice stopped me.

  “This isn’t the start,” he said. “It’s not even the prologue.” He came to stand next to me in the door of Hank’s room, looking out onto the ward of the wounded and the dying, beds shoved close as graves. “As far as world’s ending goes, we’re well into the first act.” I stared at him, an entirely new sort of hopelessness creeping through me. Why did I have to be here? Why couldn’t I have just died at twenty-six like I was meant to?

  “Cain fell off the radar and I was grateful,” Uriel said. “Truthfully, I was preoccupied with what was happening in Tartarus. But he wasn’t gone. He’d been leashed, and what I want is whoever is holding the other end. You should want them too.” He patted me on the shoulder. “They’re the same person who gave that sword to Owen and put your boyfriend over a barrel.”

  He sighed. “I was hoping when you showed up gunning for Cain, it would force the man behind the curtain to step out. But I underestimated both how powerful and how obsessed with you Cain was. So—and this is the first and only time you’ll ever hear this from me—I am sorry. I got you involved in a fight you couldn’t win, and I had no right to do that.”

  Another heavy vehicle rolled by outside, shaking the floor under our feet, and Uriel frowned. “Now we really need to go. You need to be back in Minneapolis. Leo will forgive you. Death is not petty.”

  This time I was the one to stop him. “So what about this? The Fallen and the plague and all?”

  “We keep looking,” Uriel said. “We keep shining a light into corners looking for the Fallen who started Cain on this path and eventually they run out of places to hide.”

  “That’s a lousy answer,” I said, but Uriel shrugged.

  “Nonetheless, it’s the only one I have. And don’t get any ideas of coming back here,” he said. “You’re not as expendable as you used to be. You’re not a game piece. You’re the game piece. You could do a lot of damage.” He reached for me, and I felt the air being sucked out of the space around my body.

  “Don’t!” I screamed but my stomach dropped, like when you miss a step coming off a sidewalk, and when I opened my eye
s I was standing on a street corner in Minneapolis.

  “Remember what I said,” Uriel told me. “Take it seriously. I’m not the enemy here. Keep Leo safe. The Grim Reaper is one of the few things that can stop Cain and the Fallen. Once he has his Scythe, anyway.”

  A car honked at me as I swayed too close to the traffic, and when I looked back Uriel was gone. He’d left me in front of a motel that the epithet fleabag would be too generous for. I kicked the snow. “Son of a bitch goddamn fucking angel.”

  “Amen, sister.” A bum on a bus stop bench grinned at me and offered me a slug from a brown bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

  “Sure, why not,” I said, and slumped down next to him. He looked me over.

  “You look like seven kinds of hell, child.” I drank the vile, fiery liquid that was inside the bottle and handed it back to him.

  “I’ve had a rough night.”

  “Boyfriend trouble?” He took his own pull off the bottle and coughed, spitting something brown into the snowbank. “Feels like this winter is never gonna end.”

  “I wish it was that simple,” I sighed.

  “Never is,” the bum said. “But don’t you fret. Sooner or later all this’ll be gone and it’ll be spring again. Always liked spring. Cold traps you in. Makes it hard to move from place to place. Like the earth is tryin’ its hardest to keep you pinned.”

  I waved off the bottle when he offered it to me again. “You’re pretty smart for an old drunk guy.”

  “It’s six A.M.,” he grunted. “I ain’t that drunk yet.”

  “Ava?” I snapped up to see the last person I wanted or expected looking at me like she’d just stepped on a big pile of dog droppings.

  “Viv?” I said. “What are you doing here?”

  “Not sitting on a bus bench day drinking, for a start,” she said, hefting a brown paper bag of food.

  “Where’s Leo?” I said, standing up and brushing snow off my jeans. “Why aren’t you with him?”

  Viv sighed, looking up and down the block, and then jerked her head at me. “Come inside. It’s not safe out here.”

  “Good luck, sister,” the bum called as I followed Viv into the motel. “See you in the spring.”