by T. Frohock
The doors popped open. Diago caught them before they could swing back and hit the wall.
A full-length mirror covered the inside of the right-hand door. The glass was mottled and black in places. He barely made out his reflection. Was this why Rudi told me to be glad the armoire didn’t open?
He shrugged off the idea and turned to examine the cluttered contents. A man’s brightly embroidered jacket with a satin lining hung on a rack. Judging from the pictures he’d seen of the family, the coat wouldn’t fit the Grier men, nor could he imagine any of them wearing anything so flashy. The style was more in keeping with the taste of a rogue Diago had once known by the name of Rainier Laurent.
Diago lifted the jacket and checked the pockets. They were empty. Something within the fabric crinkled, though. Curious, he ripped the seam, and there, in the lining, he found a set of identity papers for Pierre Laurent, one of Rainier’s many aliases.
“Rainier?” He glanced at the armoire.
A muffled moan seemed to come from the other side of the mirror. Diago’s flesh horripilated at the sound. What the hell?
Outside, the wind howled. The house creaked and groaned.
“Christ,” he murmured. No one moaned behind the mirror—it was only the house, shuddering beneath the storm. “I’m spooking myself again.”
He turned back to the armoire just as a woman’s blue cloche hat fell from the top shelf. Diago dropped Rainier’s coat in time to catch the hat. The bow was torn and hung askew from its ribbon. Inside, bits of bone and brown hair were stuck to the name written in black marker on the lining.
Laura Howe.
Diago touched the rust-colored bloodstains. The bone shards were thin—like someone shattered her skull.
He had known her, too. She used to sing in the Parisian cafés, her voice full like the summer sun. He’d once played his violin in the park while she turned her freckled face toward the sky.
And someone murdered her here. With a sinking heart, Diago removed the armoire’s clothing piece by piece. He found identity papers, jewelry, and coins sewn into hemlines. More ominously, he found bullet holes and bloodstains on the clothing that soon lay piled beside him.
The cabinet seemed bottomless.
He opened a drawer. A flash of red caught his eye. He hoped he was wrong. He knew he wasn’t. It was Harvey’s scarf.
“No,” he whispered, clenching the silk in his hands. Had Frau Weber returned it to the armoire while Diago was engaged with Karl and Rudi in the music room? Probably.
Anger threaded through his veins . . . and fear. How many nefilim had died in this charnel house?
On the other side of the hall, cannon fire erupted during the finale of Tchaikovsky’s Overture. Diago’s head snapped up at the sound. That isn’t right. Cannons weren’t used in that recording.
The distinctive thunder of a howitzer overrode the cannon fire. It came from his right. From behind the mirror.
Sweat slicked Diago’s palms as he forced himself to look.
Fog undulated over the glass and formed around the splotches to spread . . .
Not fog . . . , Diago thought.
Dark sounds. Hundreds, maybe thousands, of dark sounds, coalescing and congealing on the other side of the mirror in shades of purple and black and gray. Thin cracks wormed between the lines and stretched across the mirror. Ichor seeped from the crevices.
A palm smacked the glass.
Diago jumped backward. Harvey’s scarf slipped from his hands and fluttered to his feet.
The owner of the hand swiped at the colors. The dark sounds smeared but never really parted. Even so, Diago made out the broken nose that sat crooked on Harvey Lucas’s face.
With his own breath loud in his ears, Diago stared in disbelief. “Harvey?”
Harvey’s mouth moved soundlessly but Diago could read his lips. Copped it, mate, I’ve copped it.
It was a phrase Diago knew well from the war, one that echoed through the trenches after a shelling. For the mortals, it meant they’d caught a shell; for the nefilim it signified they’d been hit by a killing glyph. The result was all the same—it was a mortal wound.
“Harvey, no . . .” He stepped forward, ready to give his old friend whatever comfort he could.
Harvey shook his head and signed for Diago to stay back. With great effort, he forced his finger through the colors of the dark sounds, tracing his warning in large sloping numbers and letters: 0 HOUR AT 0300 DON’T TOUCH MIRROR OR UR NAPOO SOULEA.
Harvey’s eyes went wide. Something yanked him away from the glass. The bruised colors flowed over the spot and dissolved the words.
“Harvey!” Diago shouted. He started forward and caught himself before he rapped his palm against the mirror. DON’T TOUCH MIRROR OR UR NAPOO.
Curling his fingers into a fist, he backed away from the armoire and quickly deciphered Harvey’s message. The first two parts were easy.
Zero hour at 0300. Whatever attack was coming would happen at three. Napoo was trench jargon for “finished.” Don’t touch the mirror or you’re finished.
Which meant the strike would probably originate from that tainted glass. Now Rudi’s response to Diago’s comment about the locked armoire made perfect sense. Be glad.
“The bastard knew this was going to happen.” Diago grabbed an armchair and dragged it to the armoire. He slammed the doors shut and shoved the chair against them.
As he backed away from the closet, he considered the last word: SOULEA. It made no sense. He didn’t believe it was a part of the war lexicon from any of the combatants.
All I know is that something grabbed Harvey. Some thing big enough to wrench the huge nefil backward like he was a rag doll.
The anomaly. It has to be. The entity was trapped and attempting to free itself.
And the Grier brothers are helping it. But how? Diago looked at the clothing and personal effects spread across the floor. The answer was obvious. “They’re feeding it nefilim.”
And if I don’t get out of here, I’m next.
He went to the door and grabbed his bag. The doorknob refused to budge.
Standing back, he formed a sigil to break the lock. This time he didn’t wait for the cover of music. No sooner had he finished the last line did he snap his song at the ward. Shades of black and green enveloped the plate, swirling over the metal. The glyph’s tongue flicked into the keyhole.
Without warning, a brilliant flash of light shot from the lock and blinded Diago. Somehow his song had turned against him. He dropped his bag and formed a protective ward, but he was too late.
The white light struck him, the blow landing like an electric shock, knocking him off his feet, and the floor rushed up, and the night came down, and the world went black, and silence descended quick and hard . . . like the stillness that follows the falling of a bomb.
Diago dreamed of digging. They were in a field. Maybe it was at the Somme, maybe Dammstrasse—he couldn’t remember where, because the relentless bombing made everyplace the same. In need of a trench, his company dug into the mud.
They were two meters deep when Diago’s shovel went through a man’s stomach. It was a grave from earlier in the war. The uniforms were French. The bodies were putrid and had begun to liquefy; their flesh was the color and texture of Camembert cheese—yellow and soft, dissolving beneath the rain.
Someone shouted, “Incoming!”
Then came the distinct riffle in the air that preceded a shell.
They didn’t try to pinpoint the threat. Their bodies were conditioned to respond to the noise.
Automatically, they threw themselves into the grave. The ground shook. A plume of mud showered them, miring the living to the dead.
A heartbeat passed and then two. They rose and began to dig again.
Dark sounds erupted around them. Diago saw them as purplish clouds, black like flies, rising over the landscape. They seeped into his ears and crawled into his mouth . . . and still he burrowed through the dead until . . .
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nbsp; A ferocious crash thundered through the room. Diago’s eyes snapped open. His clothes were clammy against his flesh. Bile rose to the back of his throat. His head pounded and his vision blurred. He rolled to his knees. The dream clung to him like a caul.
I’m in Durbach. In Karinhall. Wake up, wake up, wake up!
His gaze swept over the face of his watch.
0300.
Zero hour.
That did it. He finally sloughed his way free of the nightmare.
The armoire’s doors burst open, flinging the chair across the room. It shattered against the wall.
Static hissed from Rudi’s radio.
The lamp dimmed and brightened.
Diago scrambled to his feet.
Overhead, a hairline crack zigzagged through the plaster and stopped when it met the wall over the bed’s headboard. The rust-colored blotches throbbed in shades of crimson and black.
Those aren’t stains from a leak, Diago suddenly realized. It’s a sigil.
He whirled to face the armoire’s mirror. “Who are you?” What are you?
Four loud knocks struck the walls in rapid succession. The wallpaper rippled as if something moved beneath it. The bulge was too thin to be a mouse or rat. More like a fingernail, tracing a line to a certain point.
Another undulation swelled over the headboard. This one was thicker. Diago designed a sharp-edged sigil and sang it to life. The white fire of Prieto’s magic joined with his. He shaped the glyph with a sinister edge and threw it at the wall.
The ward stabbed the bulge. A scream, high and thin, pierced the night. The paper darkened around the tear. The same oily black substance that had oozed from the mirror dripped to the wainscoting. A hard shudder heaved beneath the paper. Then the bulge disappeared.
Trusting neither the armoire nor its tainted mirror at his back, Diago moved toward the center of the room, closer to the hearth.
The lamp’s bulb burst in a shower of sparks. With the storm outside clouding the bare fingernail of a new moon, the complete darkness hampered even his superior night vision. He summoned a sigil for fire and tossed it toward the fireplace. The dry wood caught and flames blazed to life.
Across the hall, the radio sputtered through the frequencies and then landed on a choral arrangement. The violin’s half-familiar melody knocked against the back of Diago’s brain, worming its way toward his tongue. The desire to join the strange chorus grew until it became an unbearable need.
The chorus sang through Rudi’s radio. “I remember when you were Yago.”
Diago reached into his pocket and withdrew the brooch. The memory of that incarnation came flooding back. Bernard and George and the chapel were just the beginning.
Or maybe closer to the end. “And you are Frauja,” he said. Or are you? Frauja was an angel, but this creature’s voice was muddied by a thousand voices, constructed with the dark sounds of violent deaths. How could they be the same?
SOULEA.
Diago finally comprehended the mystery behind Harvey’s warning. Soul-eater. Harvey tried to write soul-eater, because this is Frauja. He has absorbed the auras of both the daimon- and the angel-born; their voices augment his, but they have also become a part of him. And it is the songs of the daimon-born that have masked his angelic nature.
That likewise explained the unholy chorus. Frauja’s true angelic voice was lost to him now. He can only speak through the dead.
This was Durbach’s anomaly.
And he will be my death if I don’t move with care. “Frauja.” Diago gripped the brooch tightly. “I remember you.”
“You asked for my song and I sang you my beginning: how the Firstborn angels lost our rebellion and how we were banished from that dimension.”
“You told me that many tried to return,” Diago whispered. “But their songs were turned against them and they died, flaming like stars as they fell.”
“Yes,” hissed the chorus. “So we fled until we discovered the earthly realm. Here we found the mortals and conquered the daimons to establish our rule. Remember me.”
“I remember you loved me,” Diago blurted. “Amor vincit omnia—that is what you said to me on our first night together . . . love conquers all.”
As soon as the words left his mouth, he knew they were a lie. What they had experienced in that incarnation, it wasn’t love. Call it infatuation, a burning need to possess another, or even simply lust, but it was not love.
Still . . . if Frauja recalls it as such, I might be able to win his trust. All he needed to do was buy time. If zero hour was at three, then the attack probably ended at dawn. He glanced at his watch. It had stopped.
Static growled through the radio.
From anger or because Frauja wants to hear more? After another moment of silence slipped past, Diago took a chance it was the latter. “I remember your eyes . . . they are the color of tourmaline threaded with ribbons of gold, and they become a brilliant green when you wear your mortal form. Your body is perfection.”
“I am burned and scarred from the war,” snarled the chorus.
You’re also vain. Diago trapped the retort behind his teeth. “Only on your left side. You think those old wounds mar your beauty, but they don’t. They lend you character and grace.”
Mollified, the chorus murmured, “Liar.” But they gave the insult a note of affection.
Diago glanced toward the window. Would the dawn ever come? “I remember we would walk in the night with the stars raining over us.”
“Why did you betray me?” asked the chorus.
Diago’s heart stammered. He fought to keep his fear out of his voice. “I didn’t.”
“Liar.” This time the slur carried the angel’s acrimony. “You sang against me and locked me in this prison realm.”
Diago ran his thumb over the brooch’s emerald. The setting pricked his finger. Blood stained the angel’s mouth.
He stared at it dumbly. Christ, think, say something, anything! “It was George,” he said. “He was jealous of us. He locked you away and killed me.”
Frauja didn’t reply. The silence stretched between them.
Does he believe me? Afraid of the answer, Diago didn’t dare ask.
The armoire’s door widened until the splotchy mirror reflected the outline of Diago’s body.
“Come to me, Yago,” sang the angel with his dark sounds. “Come to me now and I will believe you. I will offer you forgiveness and forget the past. There will be no vehmgericht if you give yourself to me tonight.”
Harvey’s warning came roaring back into Diago’s mind: DON’T TOUCH MIRROR OR UR NAPOO.
If he stepped through that mirror, Frauja would never let him leave. And I will never see my son again, or Miquel, never hold them or feel their love.
“No,” he whispered. “No,” he repeated, louder. “What we had is no more. I cannot go back into the past.”
The angel on the brooch opened its mouth, screeching like a violin in pain—in his mind Diago heard the bow punch the strings (quick jabs: strike, strike, strike)—and the cacophony of bombs whistled with a thunderous clamor, like the percussion of a thousand drums, the beats coalescing into the steady pulse of timpani playing a funeral march, a dirge that sounded like nefilim crying, crying, crying as they sang . . .
Harvey’s cheek suddenly smashed against the glass.
Diago instinctively reached out for his friend.
Harvey tried to shake his head, but a massive hand that could only belong to Frauja pinioned his face against the mirror.
Diago stepped forward. “There has to be a way, Harvey!”
Harvey’s mouth said, “Help me.” The sound of his voice came not from the armoire but through Rudi’s radio.
Because it isn’t Harvey speaking. Frauja is manipulating him like a puppet.
As if to confirm Diago’s suspicions, Harvey traced a new warning, DON’T.
Frauja’s fingers squeezed the dying nefil’s head.
Harvey’s mouth opened in a silent cry. The re
d and blue colors of his aura deepened into purple spirals of pain. He gasped and fought for control, the battle written on his blunt features.
Rage flowed through Diago’s blood. “Let him go!” He took three steps toward the mirror. There had to be a way to extract Harvey from that hell.
He was less than a meter away when Harvey finally pushed his last message through the radio: “. . . son . . . your son . . . th-think . . . of . . .”
Static drowned the rest.
My son. Terror washed over Diago and froze him in place. How does he know about Rafael? And then it hit him: his conversation with Karl. And my phone call to Santuari . . . oh, Jesus Christ . . . That was why Frauja had allowed Diago to move through the house with impunity. I thought I was spying, but it’s Frauja who knows everything about me.
The realization must have showed on Diago’s face, because Harvey smiled a crooked smile. With his free hand, he gave Diago the thumbs-up.
The angel’s hand pressed harder. A thin line of blood squirted from Harvey’s nose and his smile disappeared. The whites of his eyes flamed red as blood vessels burst. Dark sounds picked up the blood spatters and linked the mottled spots to form a sigil.
Diago realized the truth Harvey had known all along: I can’t save him by sacrificing us both. But I can make damn sure his death isn’t wasted.
Diago designed a glyph to seal the border between the mirror and the mortal realm. With a wild cry of desperation, he vocalized the sigil to life and charged it with the magic of Prieto’s tear, and then he sent it across the glass.
Frauja’s ward pushed against the barrier between the realms. Harvey’s blood lent strength to the angel’s spell. The air grew oppressive and the temperature dropped.
Diago’s glyph shimmered . . . but held. Barely. It’s barely holding. Hoarse with fatigue, he raised his song again to shoot his aura into the sigil. Viridian lines edged in black surged through the ward.
The thin hum of the dark sounds swept into the room, accompanied by the percussion of the bombs. The dissonance rose to become a single piercing chord that brought tears of agony to Diago’s eyes.
The armoire shattered. Shards of wood flew through the room. The concussion sent Diago reeling. He stumbled over the settee and fell. The couch overturned and covered him. He huddled there, covering his head and shielding his eyes as the splinters rained down around him.
