Max focused on his body and its pain, trying to regain the distance the shuwwafat’s potions had given him from sensation. The Beast raged, distracting him with its only emotion. He grabbed hold of the couch, locked his body, trembled from the agony. Tears burned his eyes.
“Should I push or something?” he asked between clenched teeth, desperate for something to do.
Mrs. Chan shook her head, scoffed, “Push with what? Through where?” She pulled out a length of crimson cloth from the pod. Max thought she had used it to sop up his blood, until he remembered the scarves, blood red, the symbol of the spirits of his victims. Painfreak. The rape by ghosts. Mrs. Chan glanced at the silk scarf in her hand and then threw it away.
Max wished Kueur and Alioune did not have to dance. He needed their love to balance the pain with pleasure. He wanted the warmth of their bodies to take away the chill in his spine.
Dex relaxed in his bonds. His mouth stayed opened, but he stopped screaming. The crystals in his eye sockets filled with light, one purple, the other red. Light gathered in his mouth, strained from his ears and nose genitals, streamed out, flying up at first, then dipping toward the floor before finally settling into the trail of shimmering air behind the dancing twins.
What was left of Dex’s soul flowed along the bridge built by Kueur and Alioune. It spiraled down to the child’s emptiness, balanced between heaven and hell on the magic of mortal will and demonic power.
Suddenly, the soul sparked and slipped. A cry split the air, thin and high-pitched, like a distant keening. The stream of light spilling from Dex strained against the path leading to its receptacle, as if tempted by another destination. The air behind Dex wavered like a heat mirage as the outline of a human form appeared, arms spread. Flickering shadows on the wall behind Dex lengthened, curled, shivered with growing frenzy.
Seraphim, Max tried to say through the bit. Enoch. Spreading its wings. Luring the newborn’s soul away.
But the twins kept dancing. The shuwwafat and Navajos sang, the sadhu chanted, the oknirabata blew into the didgeridoo. The power of Kueur and Alioune’s primal sorcery kept the soul on the bridge, while the sacred sounds of mortal music drowned the angel’s alien song and kept it at bay.
The soul light poured into the hole in the pod. Warmth spread through Max, dampening his pain and fear. A gurgling sound rose from the pod. Max’s heart skipped with shock and excitement over the tiny voice.
Mrs. Chan bore down with her instruments on the leathery wall while the soul transfer was completed. Dex’s last gasp came with the light leaving his eyes and the extinguishing of the fire coming from his mouth. He sagged against his bindings. The twins fluttered to the floor, gasping for air.
Dex’s head snapped back up. The crystals in his eyes turned black. The air behind him lost its mirage of a human figure as the angel took over the empty shell of Dex’s body and screamed in a voice Max was certain the twins had never managed to draw from him.
“Ani Enoch!” Dex cried out, the scream dying into hoarse speech made ragged by sporadic breathing, as if the angel was having difficulty playing such a delicate instrument as a deceased human body. “Achad mayalphi malachi chuurban shel Alohim. Ani haza’am shel Alohim. Ani hanakamah shel Alohim. Ani basi besh’velcham.”
The shuwwafat and sadhu fell silent, and the Navajos’ song diminished as the shaman with the turquoise in his eyes and the silver in his hair turned to Max and said, “I am Enoch, one of the Lord’s thousand thousand angels of destruction. I am the Lord’s wrath, I am the Lord’s vengeance. I have come for you.”
Max struggled to sit up, but gave way to the shuwwafat’s insistent pushing. “What—”
The Navajo said, “It speaks Hebrew. We know the tongues of lost tribes, though this wisdom is one of our secrets. Don’t you tell a soul.”
The angel spoke again, making the oknirabata lose his breath. “Bayamim elah shel merivah. Itah’avodah shel Alohim he gadvlah v’norah. Ha’pashaim shelocham tzo’akim le ’tagmolim. Aval haim adayin to maspik gedolim l’hasav es t’ shumas ha’lev shel Alohim.” It wrenched an arm out of its restraint and clawed at the other straps holding Dex’s corpse.
The sadhu went to the twins, roused them out of their exhaustion. Mrs. Chan worked at removing a part of the pod’ s shell. The Navajo spoke, his voice quavering as only the oldest of his companions still sang. “In these days of strife, the Lord’s work is vast and terrible. Your crimes cry for retribution, but still they are not great enough to command the Lord’s attention.”
With a triumphant cry, the angel freed its other arm and its legs and slid off the gurney. The twins and the sadhu surrounded him, while the oknirabata hefted the boomerang he had pulled out of his travel bag.
“What the hell is going on over there?” Dr. Plummer yelled from behind his screens and consoles. “These readings aren’t making any sense. Did something happen to Max? The baby? Do you need my help?”
Dex’s crystal eyes were pools of darkness. He moved toward Max, saying, “Hafachti es atzme l’anayim v’aznayim shel Ani hezgarti es atzmme k’tzadik she! Alohim. V’nahafachte l’yad shelo. Ane basee bes’velcham b’shem Alohim.”
The oknirabata threw the boomerang, which struck Dex’s corpse in the head and staggered the angel. The twins and the sadhu rushed him, landing bone-shattering blows against Dex’s ribs, head, and spine. They forced him down to the ground and tried holding him in limb locks. Crystal fragments embedded in Dex’s flesh cut the twins and the sadhu as their bodies ground against each other. The oknirabata approached with a stone knife in one hand, a curved bone in the other. He pointed the bone at Dex, singing of death.
“Shut up,” Dr. Chan said to Dr. Plummer as she hunched over Max’s belly, plunging her hands, each holding a bright metal instrument, into the pod.
Max reflexively threw his head back, arched his back, ad clenched his jaws, trying to fight off the pain. He searched for a thought, an image to shield himself from sensation. For a moment, he distracted himself with concern for Mrs. Chan because she was not wearing surgical gloves, as Dr. Plummer always did when dealing with blood.
The Navajo translating for Max kneeled beside him and whispered, “I have made myself the Lord’s eyes and ears. I have surrendered myself to the Lord’s justice, and become his hand. I have come for you in the Lord’s name.”
“Manzer!” Enoch said, grabbing the sadhu’s throat and snapping his neck. It threw the sadhu aside. Max’s distant cousin crashed to the floor, and his billowing white shirt settled over him like a thin coat of frost.
The twins stood the angel up, trapped his arms, looked to the oknirabata. “To hell with the bone,” Alioune said, breathless. “His head. Cut it off.”
The angel kicked, breaking the oknirabata’s knee. He broke away from Kueur, grabbed the oknirabata’s knife hand, forced it back against the shaman. Killed him, with a thrust to the heart. The oknirabata flopped to the floor, one sneaker coming free, bone tapping wood as it came to rest.
Madness, Max wanted to say, agreeing with the doctor, weeping not from the pain but from the death of innocents and allies for his crimes. His sins. He yearned to throw himself at the seraphim, offer himself in exchange for the safety of the twins and the rest. The Beast strained against his control, ravenous for blood and violence. Only the child kept him back, bathing in the pain of birthing, and guilt.
“We’re all in the shit now,” the eldest Navajo said. “Time to make us some angel boots,” said the Navajo translator, joining his brother, father, and nephew. They stood in a line between Max and the angel, one shaman for each holy point of the compass they might have taken if they chose to abandon Max, prayer sticks and steel knives in hand.
“Now we pay the price for his help in the old days,” the Navajo ancient said, sadly, with resignation, not taking his gaze off Dex.
“Not long now,” Mrs. Chan whispered. “Stay strong, for your child.”
The shuwwafat whispered prayers in Arabic and glanced at the twins as she
took one bloody, sharp-edged instrument from Mrs. Chan and handed her a clamp.
The twins fought with the seraphim. They exchanged a look, moved in perfect synchronization. Sweeping Dex’s feet, they picked him up as he fell backward, lifted him, heaved him across the room. They collapsed, tripping over the bodies of the oknirabata and the sadhu, and lay still. With open eyes, fingers curled into fighting claws, and sides rising and falling, they looked like a pair of spent cheetahs watching their prey escape. Foam bubbled from their mouths. Muscles twitched with the memory of battle under their torn skin, the only means left to them of expressing frustration over their helplessness.
After sailing past the Navajos, Dex landed in Dr. Plummer’s computer workstation. Monitoring equipment, keyboards, and screens tumbled to the ground. Sparks flew, raw electricity buzzed and hissed. Dex scrambled to his feet, pulling cables and wires. Max cried out as probes and sensors were ripped off of his skin. Dex’s flesh crackled under the caress of brief electric arcs. The angel babbled, stopped, pressed hands against the sides of Dex’s head.
Mrs. Chan grunted. Max felt his links to the child drop. The constructs of rock and sea dissipated, and the landscape of his mind returned to its familiar bleakness. He was alone with the Beast, which howled its exultation. Max felt a blast of cold air come through his belly.
“The child is free. Time to take the pod out,” Mrs. Chan said. She and the shuwwafat deftly sliced connective tissue away the pod. Mixed in with bloody pieces of Max were more scraps of scarlet scarves.
Dr. Plummer emerged from the wreckage, cursing. He froze at the sight of Dex, then dug through his equipment until he found a medical kit. Pulling out gauze and a tube of antiseptic, he approached Dex.
“Sit down, man, and let me look at you,” the doctor said, pulling Dex toward an overturned chair. “They wouldn’t let me treat you before, but now I can get a—”
The angel shrugged. Dr. Pullman staggered backward, retrieved his balance, reached for Dex again. The angel caught the doctor’s arm, and with its free hand grabbed hold of a monitor by its power cord and swung it into Dr. Pullman’s skull. The swing’s momentum carried the doctor into the Box, where he fell and did not get up.
The seraphim looked at Dex’s hands, his feet. “Do not interfere,” it said, leaving Dex’s mouth open as if surprised by its speech.
“The monster haunts paths the man’s soul once walked,” the ancient Navajo said.
“Your angel’s rummaging in the dead man’s head,” the Navaho translator said to Max. “Kicked up English, so it don’t have to spit that old Hebrew no more. Probably knows how to tango now, too. Not so easy as taking a living man, is it, angel? Nobody in that meat to help you run the show? Like the white man coming here without us showing him how to hold his dick in the woods. Maybe he get it, maybe he don’t. Maybe I get me a new pair of boots, one in angel hide, the other in dead man’s skin. What’s left of him, anyhow.” The Navajo flourished his knife and let out a belligerent growl. The tip of his prayer stick trembled as if the spirit it confronted was too vast for it to contain with a single point.
“Good thing you can understand your angel now,” said the youngest to Max, “‘cause it looks like we won’t be around to translate much longer.”
“No,” said Max.
“Stand aside,” Enoch commanded.
Again Max said, “No.”
“Help me lift the pod,” Mrs. Chan said. The shuwwafat reached into Max with Mrs. Chan, and together they interlocked their fingers under the pod and pulled it out.
Max convulsed, feeling as if all his internal organs were being removed. The two women placed the pod between him and the sofa back. The pod’s walls moved, and something splashed inside. The leathery flesh was warm against Max’s hip.
“Give the baby a moment to adjust to the separation,” Mrs. Chan said. “We need to close him up.”
“I will trim the skin growth,” the shuwwafat said. “You sew and tie.”
Max turned his head away from their work, the sound of cutting and the sensation of cool metal slicing and puncturing him, and thread stitching him together.
The seraphim walked. Dex’s crystalline genitals clinked and shimmered like filled champagne glasses in the candlelight.
With the baby gone, Max saw no reason for more death beyond his own. The Beast filled the void within him with its hungry roar.
“Let it take me,” he said to the Navajos. “Save yourselves, take the baby and the twins out of here.”
Kueur stirred. “Non, Tonton.”
Alioune tried to rise on one shaky arm. “Never.”
Three Navajos exchanged glances. The other, tainted with blood from another realm, smiled. “Fuck it,” he said, and leapt at the angel.
He rammed his prayer stick through Dex’s right eye before the angel caught his wrists, crushed them, pushed the Navajo to the ground. A sharp knee to the shaman’s jaw snapped his head back. Cracked bone. The Navajo slumped to the floor.
The other three Navajos jumped forward, slashing air and flesh. Four bodies converged, wrestled. Silver and turquoise flashed, along with steel. Wet, sucking sounds and harsh breathing were punctuated by occasional curses and cries of pain.
“Is this what you call vengeance?” Max shouted. “Taking innocent lives?”
The oldest Navajo was thrown aside, knife planted in Dex’s other eye. The remaining two forced their blade hands toward Dex’s throat as the twins encouraged them to sever the head. Suddenly, the seraphim leaned back, giving way to mortal strength for a moment. With a slight tap of their arms, the angel redirected the Navajos’ desperate lunges. They stabbed each other in the shoulder and went to the floor in each other’s arms, coming to rest atop broken prayer sticks and a pool of blood.
“If they served you, they were not so innocent,” Enoch said.
The shuwwafat sobbed, picked up the oknirabata’s stone knife, stood between Max and the angel. Mrs. Chan spared a moment from her furious stitching to slide her cane closer to her foot. Dex’s left arm hung by threads of sinew to his shoulder. A deep gash had been carved into the base of his neck. The jewels of his eyes were gone, but living darkness swirled in the pits that had housed them. Gaps showed in the lines of multicolored gem teeth embedded in his shredded gums. Skin flapped loose, exposing ribs, broken bone, glistening organs, a still heart. His genitals glowed bright with the blessed light of angels. When he began walking toward Max, tiny gem fragments rained from his tattered flesh.
“They served me no more than you serve the one you call your Lord,” Max said, pushing through Mrs. Chan’s attempts to keep him down. “They served honor, and loyalty, and the bonds of blood and justice.”
The angel stopped short, raised its good arm high, man-aged to haul the left arm partway. “Don’t dare speak of justice. I will not hear it, not from your mouth. Killer! Rapist!”
“My victims did not send you,” said Max, as Mrs. Chan tied off the last thread. He felt the warmth of trickling blood between his legs, running down his thighs.
“No, they could not. They have not yet come to rest.”
“Your Lord did not send you.”
“He … no.”
“Then who are you to judge me? Who are you to sacrifice mortal souls to your desire for my death? How are you different from what I was, from what you condemn?”
“I am Enoch! I am an angel of destruction! I am vengeance, I am punishment. I am the consequence which cannot be escaped, the truth from which there is no escape!”
“And what is the consequence that you flee, seraphim? What is the truth that drives you to me, through the blood of so many living men? What is your sin, Enoch?”
The Beast’s rage drove Max to his feet. He knocked Mrs. Chan back and upset the pod on the sofa so that some of the bloody fluid it contained spilled. A faint cry came from the pod.
The angel came forward, and the shuwwafat intercepted it. She cut fingers from the hand reaching for her, but could do nothing to stop the elbow t
hat came around to smash the side of her face in. But even on the floor, she hacked at one of Dex’s feet, until the seraphim stomped her head and neck and back to make her stop.
Mourning ululation erupted from Kueur and Alioune. Max leaned forward to take a step, but his body betrayed him. The world dropped away from him. Mrs. Chan gave him a push as he lost his balance and fell. He landed on the sofa inches away from the pod.
The Beast’s rage was stoked higher by its failure to engage the angel. Max blinked back tears, sweat, blood. “What did Mr. Johnson do? Or Mr. Tung? Neither of them would have given their lives defending me. Yet you possessed them, led them to their deaths.”
“Their souls were weighted with enough sin to warrant my attention. Doing the Lord’s work granted them a measure of grace.” The angel took a step toward Max. Dex’s knee snapped from the punishment it had absorbed, gave out. On all fours, the seraphim continued to make its way toward the couch.
Max shielded Mrs. Chan with his body while she probed the pod’s depths.
“He is ready to come out,” she whispered.
Pride sparked in Max. He had a son. And his son was free from the sins of his father, the pain of his mothers. His son was an innocent. From all the hurt and death and terror of his life, he had brought out something that was its antithesis.
His pride shrank to nothing as he watched the angel’s relentless progress. “Take him, train him,” he told Mrs. Chan. “Show him the paths I never took.”
“Do not flee your work so quickly, student,” Mrs. Chan replied. “I cannot do it for you.”
Max stared at the angel. “Pride,” he said.
The seraphim looked up. The pools of blackness tugged at Max’s soul.
“Pride is your sin, Enoch. You think to do the Lord’s work. You take on the pain of wronged souls. But what are you? An angel. An instrument of your Lord’s will, nothing more. How can you make yourself your Lord’s eyes and ears? How can you take on your Lord’s power of judgment? Would you take on your Lord’s power of creation next? Would you make new worlds, new life? Do you dare usurp your Lord’s place in his Heaven?”
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