And in all the excitement, while no one was watching, Malachi retrieved that piece of fruit from the storm-swept ground, holding what he believed to be his destiny in his hands.
As the humans were tempted, so was he. The elder angel brought the future to his mouth, and tasted it.
And he saw.
Hell
“I saw as He saw,” Malachi said aloud, twisting the blade of his scalpel ever so carefully within Francis’s brain.
The former Guardian cried out, straining against the straps that held him to the stone table.
“I gazed into a future of chaos, and the inevitable end of all things.”
Malachi stepped back, his surgical tool in hand.
“How could I allow something like that to occur, I ask you?” he said, seeming to confide in his captive. “The fall of the humans and their banishment from Eden was just the beginning . . . the catalyst for the nightmare to follow.”
Malachi stopped for a moment and listened to the sounds of a world changing outside the caves.
“It wasn’t long after that we were at war,” the elder continued.
“The humans’ failure proved that Lucifer was right—that humanity was not the answer—but the Allfather did not listen, still faithful to what He perceived to be His greatest creations.”
Malachi looked down at the suffering Guardian’s glazed and unfocused eyes. He wasn’t sure how much more the fallen angel could withstand, but he had to find it.
He had to find what had been so expertly hidden away for just this precise time.
“The war, as horrible as it was, provided me with the perfect cover,” Malachi said. “The perfect distraction to set my own plans for the future—for my destiny—in motion.”
He leaned in close again, tenderly stroking the Guardian’s sweatsoaked brow.
“I just want you to know how important you are to the coming future, and how much I appreciate all that you’ve done, and what you are about to sacrifice.”
“I . . . I don’t have a . . . a fucking clue . . . what . . . you’re . . . talking about,” Francis managed.
“Which is how it was supposed to be,” Malachi said, pressing his hand more firmly against Francis’s brow, holding his head steady on the stone table. “It was all part of the plan.”
Malachi placed the blade in the corner of Francis’s left eye and slowly pushed it into his brain.
“You’ve been holding something for me,” the elder said, twisting the blade and making Francis shriek.
“Now all I have to do is find it.”
Remy and Jon sat by the wood-burning stove so that their clothes might dry.
“How do you like your coffee?” Izzy asked from the tiny kitchenette.
“Black is good,” Remy said.
“Do you have any cream?” Jon asked, trembling from the dampness.
“Got no cream,” Izzy snarled, handing Remy his cup.
“Then black is good,” Jon said.
“It sure is,” Izzy muttered as she returned to the stove for Jon’s cup and her own.
She handed Jon his coffee and sat down in a lounge chair across from them. “I hate to break it to you, but you two almost got yourselves killed for nothing.”
“How so?” Remy asked after taking a sip of the scalding hot brew. It was good, or maybe it wasn’t; maybe it was just because he hadn’t had a cup of coffee in a while.
“You’re looking for my mama, and I don’t have a clue as to where she is.”
“You couldn’t have just told us that?” Remy asked. “Maybe skip the whole siccing-the-swamp-on-us business?”
Izzy laughed. “Now, what would have been the fun in that?”
“We spoke the truth, you know,” Jon said. “We don’t mean you or your mother any harm. We’ve come on a mission of forgiveness.”
“For who?” Izzy asked, scrunching up her face.
“Eden is coming,” Jon said. “You must have sensed it.”
“I’ve been having a lot of dreams,” Izzy admitted, holding her coffee mug in one hand as she rubbed her eyes. “I figured something was up, which is why I was ready for you.” She blinked several times as she brought the mug to her mouth. “You still haven’t told me who’s being forgiven.”
“The first father,” Jon said.
She looked a little confused.
“Adam,” he said. “Adam is dying and wants to be buried in Eden.”
“Adam Adam?” she asked incredulously. “Are you serious? He’s still kickin’?”
“Yes,” Jon responded. “He’s . . . still kicking, but we need your mother . . . the other half of the key to gain entrance to Eden once it returns.”
“Too bad Eve can’t have that same luxury,” Izzy said angrily as she set her mug down on a tray table beside her chair.
“It is too bad,” Jon said. “But there’s nothing we can do now to change what happened in the past. It was a long time ago, and my brethren believed—misguidedly—that the way to forgiveness was to punish the sinner.”
“It takes two to tango. You idiots burned her alive,” Izzy spat angrily.
Remy had heard that during the early 1600s the Sons of Adam had found Mother Eve and, in an attempt to make things right with the Almighty, had sacrificed her on a burning pyre. The relationship between the Daughters and the Sons had been toxic ever since.
“An act that I did not believe in,” Jon assured her.
“Aren’t you something wonderful.” Izzy gave him a look that could seriously maim, if not kill. “I couldn’t help you find my mother . . . this other half of the key you’re lookin’ for, if I wanted to. My father feared for her safety and hid her someplace that I don’t even know.”
“Your father,” Remy said as he sipped his cooling coffee. “He wasn’t human, was he?”
Izzy looked at him with anger in her eyes. “Who are you to call my daddy—”
“He was like me, wasn’t he?”
Remy had felt the touch of the divine in the way that she’d manipulated the elements. He had no doubt that she was the product of the mating of angel and human. Although he was surprised that she hadn’t been driven completely insane by the angelic side of her nature, as was the case most of the time.
“Let’s just say he was something special,” Izzy said. “Just like my mama.” She became very quiet, gazing into her coffee mug, and Remy could hear the sound of thunder in the distance as her mood affected the elements.
“What do you want from me?” she finally asked. “I can’t tell you where she is, or even if she’s still alive . . . though I think I’d know if she was dead, but that’s beside the point. I don’t know where my daddy hid her; he disappeared not long after that. He didn’t want to draw attention to me or the Daughters.”
“Attention from whom?” Remy asked her.
Izzy stared past them as she remembered. “The angels,” she said. “I saw them once . . . after Ma had already been hid. Daddy was talking to them.”
Remy was confused. He’d thought the threat came from the Cherubim, but her words suggested otherwise, that new players had just entered the field.
“There was more than one?” he asked.
“Yeah,” she said, her eyes glazing over as she remembered. “They were like miniature suns, fireballs covered in eyes, lighting up the darkness of the swamp.”
Remy physically reacted. The Thrones. What the hell did they have to do with this?
“They weren’t happy with my daddy at all,” she mused with a smile. “Wasn’t long after that he disappeared . . . but not before telling me to watch out for folks looking for my mother . . . and to show them that it wasn’t healthy for them to be doing so.”
Remy’s mind was buzzing as he tried to keep up.
“What was your father’s name?”
“Pearly,” she said with a huge smile. “Pearly Gates.”
A gaping pit opened in Remy’s stomach.
“Pearly Gates?” he repeated, just to be sure he had heard correctly, although he knew he
had.
Izzy nodded. “I don’t remember him as good as I’d like, but what I do know is that he was something special.” She paused, lost in a memory. “I remember him being kinda sad,” she said after a moment. “Like he had done something bad, and he was trying to make up for it. But he was good to me and my mama, and he made me promise to be strong when Mama, and then he, had to go away.”
Tears had started to leak from her eyes, trailing down her high cheekbones, and Izzy quickly wiped them away.
“And I have been strong,” she said. “Strong for a very long time.”
Jon set his half-drunk mug of coffee down at his feet.
“Is that it then?” he asked, obviously exasperated. “The vision I was given goes no further. If she’s not here . . .”
“Don’t give up just yet,” Remy said, cautiously optimistic. Things were suddenly . . . strangely, falling into place. “Your mother and father,” he said to Izzy. “You wouldn’t happen to have any photos of them, would you?”
Izzy stared at him, her demeanor very still. It was almost as if she didn’t want to share what little she had of her parents with them.
“I don’t have much,” she said. “It’s practically nothing.”
“That’s fine,” Remy said. “I would just like to see them . . . if that’s all right.”
He could feel Jon staring at him, anxious to know what he was up to.
Izzy hesitated.
“Please?” Remy flashed her a smile that he’d been told once or twice was quite charming, although that had come from his wife, and she’d had a tendency to lie to make him feel better, or to get what she wanted.
But it worked this time too. Izzy got up from her chair, leaving the cramped living room space and disappearing through a doorway into what Remy figured was her bedroom.
“What’s this about?” Jon asked. “How could her pictures help us in—”
“Trust me,” Remy told him, as the woman returned carrying a wrinkled paper bag.
“I’ve been meaning to get a book,” she said, plopping down into her seat and opening the bag. “Y’know, one of those books you put pictures in?”
“A photo album?” Remy suggested.
“Yeah, yeah, a photo album . . . I need one of those.”
She removed a stack of old photos and began to shuffle through them. “Most of these are just friends who helped raise me after my folks were gone.”
And then her face lit up with a smile as she stopped at one photo in particular. “Here it is,” she said. “I guess she was quite the singer when she was young.”
Hesitantly, she handed the picture over to Remy.
Remy recognized the woman at once—much younger, of course, but there was no mistaking Fernita Green.
“This is your mother?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“Your mother is Fernita Green,” he said.
Izzy’s face scrunched up. “No.” She took the picture back. “My mother’s name is Eliza Swan.”
Remy’s heart began to race. His mind immediately went to his many visits with the old woman he knew as Fernita Green, her missing memories, how she was looking for something very important that she’d lost.
Now Remy knew what that something was. And he also knew that he might just have put a very good friend in a lot of danger.
Jon was staring at him, trying to read the expression on his face.
“What is it?” he started to ask, but was interrupted by Izzy, who was handing another photograph to Remy.
“This is the only one I have of my dad,” she said. “I don’t know what it was for, or who even took it, but one of the Daughters gave it to me to remember him by.”
The picture was old and grainy. It looked as though it might have been taken inside some sort of club. All the patrons were black, and Remy recognized a young Fernita Green—Eliza Swan—singing on a stage.
“Daddy’s the one in the front row staring at Mama as if there wasn’t another living person on the planet,” Izzy said proudly.
The photo was black-and-white, and the man whom Izzy pointed out as her father was a tad blurry, but he looked pretty much the same as the last time Remy had seen him, other than having a little bit more hair—and being black.
Remy knew Pearly Gates by another name.
He knew him as Francis, and suddenly things became a whole lot more interesting.
And dangerous.
“We have to leave,” Remy said, standing quickly. “We have to get back to Massachusetts right away.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
Hell
The memories actually helped to lessen the pain.
Francis let his mind go, allowing the buried recollections to float to the surface as they attempted to squeeze themselves between what he did remember, changing the past to something altogether new.
Brockton, Massachusetts: 1953
Eliza was crying.
She understood why it had to be this way, but it didn’t make it any easier to accept.
“How much will it take from me?” she asked softly.
Pearly knelt at the base of the wall, drawing strange symbols with a black paint that he’d made from crushing hard-shelled beans grown inside a dead man’s skull, and mixing the powder with a bit of blood from each of them.
“Most,” he said, working on the symbols from memory. They had to be laid out just right, or they wouldn’t work.
“You?” she asked, her voice trembling. “Izzy?”
The mention of their child just about broke him. He had never imagined he could feel such pain.
“I’ll mostly be gone,” he said, feeling as if the blade of his Enochian dagger had been thrust through his heart. This whole situation was killing him, but he kept telling himself over and over again that it was for her own good—it would keep her alive.
If he didn’t . . . if they stayed together . . . she was as good as dead.
“You’ll remember me as somebody you knew . . . but little more than an acquaintance.”
The forces of Heaven wanted Eliza Swan dead, and Pearly was going to do everything in his power to see that they didn’t get their way. The magick originally used to hide her from the Thrones would work on beings of that power level for only so long, which was why Malachi had suggested something more . . . permanent.
Eliza began to sob, and Pearly had to fight the urge to go to her, to take her into his arms and tell her that everything would be all right.
Because then he’d be lying.
Everything wasn’t going to be all right.
When he finished this spell, her memory would be incomplete; huge gaps of her past would be missing; characteristics that defined her as who she was as a person, gone.
In effect, she would be somebody else.
The elder had told him to take her away, to hide her from the eyes of those who would do her harm. He still wasn’t sure why Malachi was so keen to protect her, other than the fact that he had said she was special . . . and important for the future. It made Pearly a little uncomfortable, but he would do anything to protect Eliza.
Massachusetts was as good a place as any. The former Guardian angel had always had a fondness for New England. And he had met somebody very special here once, one of his own—an angel of Heaven—and his being here, in the same state as Eliza, made Pearly feel that much safer about leaving her.
He stopped his work momentarily, wiping his hands upon a rag before reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. He removed a business card—the Seraphim’s business card. He lived among the humans, as a human. This angel—this Remy Chandler—helped them as a private investigator. A detective.
“Take this,” he told Eliza, handing her the business card.
“Who is it?” she asked, her voice still shaking with emotion as she read the card.
“If there ever comes a time that you need help,” he assured her, “this man will help you. That’s what he does . . . he helps people.”
Her lips mouthed the
name.
“I don’t understand,” she said as the tears flowed from her eyes.
“You will if it’s necessary,” he said. “He’s a good man. . . .”
“Like you?” Eliza said, reaching out to touch his face, but he stepped away to avoid her tender touch.
“Not like me at all,” Pearly said, the faces of the angels and the men that he’d killed in service to the Thrones flashing before his mind’s eye.
He returned to his work, finishing the last of the sigils before climbing slowly to his feet.
Eliza had become strangely quiet. Pearly turned toward her and found her simply standing, staring off into space, not noticing him, the angelic magick already going to work on her.
He hated this more than anything he’d ever experienced in his very long existence, but Malachi had said that it was necessary to protect her. And Pearly would do anything in his power to keep her safe.
Even if it meant losing her forever.
He watched her as she stood there, her eyes glazed as they traced the symbols drawn upon the wall. And as her eyes finished their review, the marks gradually faded away, blending with the paint of the wall.
She wouldn’t even know they were there, keeping her hidden from those who wished to do her harm.
Pearly stood beside her, resisting the urge to reach out to her, resisting the urge to take her into his arms and hold her for one last time. She would be safe here in the life he had created for her. The house was paid for, and there was money in a special bank account, the residuals of his being on the Earth for so many years, and having such a knack for killing. Somebody always wanted someone dead, and he was more than happy to oblige—for a price—when not kowtowing to the Thrones.
He wanted to tell her that he loved her, and that he was sorry. . . .
But she didn’t even know he was there.
Eliza blinked her beautiful brown eyes, and then went about her business, humming a tune, strangely off-key, as she assumed the functions of her new life. Even her talent for song had been taken away.
Pearly stopped at the door for one final look. She was in the kitchen, putting some glasses away in the cabinet.
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