Just the thought was enough to evaporate my new sensation of peace and make me pensive. I hurried my pace and trotted up to the hospital door, into the fug of antiseptic and down the corridor, the bag of oranges swinging in my hand.
And I turned a corner—and there he was: Azazel. Slap in the middle of the passageway, as darkly beautiful as I remembered and half a head taller than anyone who shuffled or queued or strode past him—even though Montenegrins are among the tallest people in Europe. Looking straight at me with those shivery inhuman eyes. A half smile twisted one corner of his mouth. He was clothed, for a change, which should perhaps have been some source of relief—he wore black pants and a white sweater of fine knit that hung loosely from his otherwise bare shoulders—and in the second that I stood there, gaping, I entertained an incongruous image of him wandering naked through a department store, oblivious to the outrage of respectable shoppers as he chose his garments. He clearly hadn’t got as far as the shoe department though; his feet were bare on the scuffed hospital linoleum.
I shook my head, feeling terror crash in my veins. “No,” I mouthed, tears burning in my eyes. Then I turned my back on him, urging my legs to a stumbling run.
The corridor darkened, light leaching from the day, and everything went deathly quiet. To my inexpressible horror I saw the human figures scattered down its length slow, as if freezing on the spot. Eyes stared, unblinking. Feet hovered mid-step. A fumbled plastic cup hung from the fingertips of an irritated-looking nurse, the water within bulging out in midair like melted glass.
Time seemed to stand still.
But not for me. In that unnatural silence I could hear my pulse thudding in my ears. Sweat slicked my thighs.
I ran. The bag of oranges struck the floor behind me. I didn’t sprint, because there seemed to be no strength in my legs, but I lurched away and kept going. I headed for the chapel, because it was the only place I could imagine offering sanctuary.
Bursting through the double doors, I found myself in a square room with a false dome and garish modernist frescoes; even the iconostasis screen before the altar looked like a garden trellis. There were no windows, just some wall lamps pretending to be stained glass. No way out, and no one in the chamber. I whirled to face the doors and backed off into the center of the chapel.
The doors were pushed back. Azazel stalked in. From the corridor beyond I heard a brief hubbub of human sound, muted again as the doors swung shut behind him; clearly the world was being allowed to carry on as normal. But here in the chapel, nothing was normal, nothing natural.
He looked much cleaner now, and less gaunt, but he hadn’t bothered to shave or cut his hair. To my eyes his smile had grown, if anything, more wolfish.
“Stop it stop it stop it,” I gabbled, holding up my hands to ward him off as he walked toward me. “You can’t come in here. This is holy ground.”
He did pause on receiving that news, and glanced toward the altar.
“Lord Jesus Christ, deliver me also from every influence of unclean spirits,” I pleaded, crossing myself.
Azazel’s expression was one of mild amusement. “I never met the man,” he said. “He was…after my time. Though to be fair, the same goes for anything after Genesis.”
Two more steps brought him so close to me that my hands were pushing against his chest. I recoiled and backed away as far as I could, nearly tripping over my own feet, ending up pressed against the flimsy screen separating notional sanctuary from notional nave.
“Are you scared of me, Milja?” he asked softly.
I didn’t answer. Under those silver eyes I was like a deer transfixed by truck headlamps.
“Why are you scared?” He reached out and touched my cheek, and I flinched.
“What do you want?”
“Huh. Isn’t that obvious?” His caress was gentle; incongruously so, after the uninhibited roughness of his attentions on the mountainside.
“No!” I said, as his fingertips grazed my throat and breastbone and then circled my nipple. He was so close that I could smell his skin—earth and sweat no longer, but a peppery warmth that was far from unpleasant. “Go away! Please!”
For a moment he looked taken aback. Then he shook his head. “Are you trying to tease? Your desire is like a beacon on a hilltop, Milja. I can see you burning.”
Maybe he could. What did I know of his perceptions? I tried to shrink from his grasp but he cupped my breast, hefting its softness. “I don’t want you!” I cried.
He laughed. “Don’t lie to me.” His hand seemed to kindle a fire in my flesh. He stooped and brushed his lips across my averted cheek, his breath warm. I shuddered from head to toe.
“I’m not lying,” I said desperately: “you’re not listening. Please.”
“I can hear your pulse,” he growled, his teeth tickling my ear. “I can smell your need.”
Desire ran through me like melted wax, pouring through my breasts and belly and pooling in my swollen sex. It took my breath away, and my dignity, and my caution.
“You piece of shit!” I sobbed.
Well, that worked. I guess not many girls had ever spoken to him like that. He stepped back—and as all the lights in the room shrank to tiny glows, the darkness grew and thickened, crowding in around him. His white sweater seemed to glow with phosphorescence. There was no amusement in his face anymore, just red pinpoints where his pupils should be.
“All right,” he said softly. “I’m listening now.”
I wet my dry lips. “You left me on the mountain. You fucked me and you left me on the mountain in the night. I could have broken a leg. I could have died out there. I had to crawl home in the dark. You fucked me and you dumped me and you’re a goddamn demon—” I broke off suddenly in panic, covering my face with my hands.
He looked away. I heard the fierce intake of his breath and then a long exhalation before he could bring himself to answer. Slowly the room lights reasserted themselves. “It was not done well,” he growled. “I…I was overwhelmed. My mind was full of old thoughts awoken.” He straightened his shoulders. “I will apologize. You will forgive me.”
If he’d been human I would have laughed. Hysterically. “Forgive you?” I repeated, in a whisper.
“Yes.” He put his open palm between my breasts to feel my pounding heart. “I forget sometimes how fragile you are.”
“Us…humans?”
“Yes.”
He meant it. He really meant it.
“You’re a rebel angel. Like in the Book of Enoch. Like in the Bible. It’s real, isn’t it? All of it?” My face was doing strange things, muscles twisting all awry. “Heaven and Hell and the Garden of Eden and Noah’s Ark and Jonah’s whale and all that? It’s all real? The Last Judgment? Eternal damnation? All of it?”
Azazel opened his mouth as if to reply, and then hesitated. Something shifted in his quicksilver eyes. “So you believe everything you read, then?” he asked.
“I believe…in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth,” I started, the words of the Creed rising to my lips with easy familiarity even though I hadn’t given my actual faith much thought in years; “and of all things, visible and invisible—”
“Shh.” Azazel put a finger on my mouth to still it, shaking his head gently. “Don’t be like that. I’m not going to hurt you. You believe in angels and demons, don’t you?”
“I do now!”
“And what is it that you think we do?”
“Drag me to Hell?”
He shook his head, the merest twitch. The little smile was back, battered and a bit uncertain now, but back. “Not right now. I’ve no interest in your”—he laughed under his breath—“immortal soul.”
“Then what?”
“This.” He caught my chin and bent to kiss me—not the full-blooded kiss of a movie hero, but a soft, slow brush of his lips across mine. It was like being touched by a burning ember: it set me on fire. For a moment I couldn’t breathe. “This,” he repeated, his hands moving over my bre
asts, circling my waist. “This,” he whispered, cupping the curve of my ass and pushing his long fingers down into places of shivering, shameful delight.
I couldn’t help it—I quivered against him and let slip a moan, half fear and half something else altogether. And yet somehow I managed to writhe out of his kiss. He looked into my eyes from inches away.
“You said you were fallen,” I whispered.
A tilt of his eyes acknowledged that, even as his hands slid over my hips. “We did not fall: we leaped.”
“Has God forgiven you?”
He curled his lip. “That seems most unlikely.”
“So you’re damned.” It was taking all my strength not to yield to the ache and the need in my own flesh.
Azazel breathed out a humorless laugh. “Oh yes.”
“In league with Satan.”
That seemed to rankle. “Leave him out of it. I am one of the Egrigoroi.” The word sounded Greek, but the press of his body was a sharp reminder that theology wasn’t his only concern, and that another matter was growing more urgent.
“You’re pure evil.”
“So you say.” He was working my blouse open now.
I pushed his face away. “Please. I can’t do this. I can’t do this with you.”
“It’s what you’ve wanted all your life.” Azazel sounded breathless. I couldn’t contradict his words, not directly. They were all true.
“It’s wrong.”
“It’s what you ache for.”
“It’s against the will of God!”
“Fuck Him!” Azazel snarled, catching my hair and pulling my head back so sharply that I saw stars. “Five thousand years of torture—do you think I’ll crawl back to the foot of the Throne now?”
Tears sprang up in my eyes, a physical reaction to the hair-pulling as much as anything. “But He’s my God,” I cried.
He had me pinned. His face loomed over mine. There was mutinous rage in it, but he kept his voice low. “No, He’s not,” he whispered. “You belong to me now.”
I don’t know if it was his words or his body or the way he’d pulled my hair, but despite my fear my body was responding with more than tears. I didn’t dare think about it; I certainly didn’t dare let him know. “I didn’t agree to that!” I whined—and his response was chilling.
“What makes you think you have a choice?”
And to that I had no answer. I was speechless with fear. I looked into his burning eyes—and even in my terror I thought of his millennia of impotent rage and humiliation. Tears brimmed out onto my cheeks and ran down my face.
For a long moment he held me. Then, without warning, he thrust me away. I staggered. “You need to calm down,” he growled. “It must be a shock to you, I realize. You’ll see more clearly in time. I will return when you’re in a better mood.”
Stepping away from him felt like stepping from a warm room into a cold night. Shivers crawled up and down my back. I pressed my knuckles to my lips and sniffed back the tears as I watched him turn and march toward the doors.
Then those doors opened inward, and a wheelchair pushed through. Sitting in the chair, bundled in a blanket and dressing gown, was my father. Steering it from behind was my cousin Vera.
For a long moment everyone froze. I watched the blood ebb from my father’s face as recognition sank in, leaving him gray as a corpse. I saw Vera turn wide eyes toward me in utter disbelief. I couldn’t see Azazel’s face from where I stood—but the lights in the room flickered and shuddered, shrank to nothing and then flared up like torches.
He took a single stride to the wheelchair, grabbed my father by the front of the dressing gown, and lifted him one-handed until they were nose to nose and my father’s feet kicked the air. I wondered wildly if Azazel had grown taller; he seemed to tower over them both.
“I should kill you,” said the demon, “very slowly.”
“Azazel,” I gasped, moving in, my feet like lead, all the air burned from my empty lungs. I don’t even know if I made an audible sound. All that came out of my mouth was a wheeze. “Please—no!”
He cast me a glare over his shoulder. “But it’s only proper to respect one’s father-in-law,” he said coldly. Then he dumped the limp frame of my father back in the wheelchair and strode from the chapel.
Everything after that was blurred, for a long time. I couldn’t recall many of the details afterward. There was shouting and crying, and me kneeling over my father, and Vera running out into the corridor. And then they came to take Papa away in a stretcher, and we followed and then we were thrown out and there was more shouting and Vera screaming in my face and everything was black, and white, and black, and white.
You whore, she screamed at me.
Look what you’ve done.
And Uncle Josif was there too and he pushed me all across the room.
Look what you’ve done, they said.
You’ve killed your father.
You whore, you lying murderous slut.
Then at some point the doctors came and said, He is resting, he is out of the woods for the moment. And I wanted to go in and see him but they wouldn’t let me, and Vera said, You will never set eyes on him again, he would die of shame if he saw his filthy diseased whore-daughter who lies with animals and worse than animals. And I was screaming that I would see him, he was my father, I had to see him, they had to let me. And all the while the nurses were trying to get us to keep our voices down and saying, You must be quiet, you cannot upset him.
So I said, I will be quiet, just let me be with him.
Then they said, Take these, and if you are quiet we will let you in but you must be quiet and if you take these they will help you calm down.
So I took the pills and after that everything got quiet like they said, really quiet and blurry and far away, and they let me see Father, lying on his bed, sleeping, looking so white and frail like a man of sticks, and I cried and kissed his hands and sat by his bed and then I don’t remember what happened after that.
Except that I woke up again and it was like trying to lift my head from under a bag of wet sand. I was lying in a corridor and there were three men going in through the door opposite me. And one of them turned and looked down at me in passing and it was the priest with the silver beard and the glasses, and he looked at me like I didn’t matter at all, and then the wet sand covered me up again and I don’t remember anything else.
When I woke, it was broad daylight. I was lying on my side across two chairs in the corridor outside my father’s room. The door was closed. There was no one nearby.
I sat up slowly. I felt terrible—weak, and floaty, and everything felt faraway and overexposed. It was hard to keep my eyes open without squinting. My mouth felt as dry as the Sahara.
I went into Father’s room. The bed was empty and made up, the sheets starch-stiff and so white I couldn’t look at them. The curtains were wide open. Vera and Josif sat in chairs in the corner of the room, hands on knees, silent.
“Adzo? Nana? Where is he?” I asked, my voice barely able to rasp from my dry throat.
Vera lifted her head. She looked gray and slack, like all the muscle in her face had collapsed overnight and everything had slid downward. “He died last night. A heart attack. They took him down to surgery but he died on the table.”
I blinked. I wanted to ask why they hadn’t woken me. But I felt too weak to speak.
“No tears?” Vera asked.
No tears. I was dry and empty, like a bone left for years on a hillside. There was nothing in me but a great hollow of exhaustion.
“In the old days,” she said, softly, softly, “we would have taken you out to a place of curses, and cut your throat and buried you facedown at a crossroads. And we would never have spoken your name again. That is how we would have cleansed our family honor.”
She was exhausted too, I saw—worn out by worry and work and lack of sleep, trying to care for my father. Her eyes were sunken in dark hollows. She had been beautiful once, in the pictures she�
��d shown me of her wedding day: petite and vivacious. Now she looked like a hag.
“You killed your father,” said Josif. “Have you nothing to say now?”
I swallowed, trying in vain to moisten my throat. “I didn’t kill him,” I said, in a voice like a dried-up wisp of grass blowing across the floor. “The priests came…I saw them…they were looking for him…”
“Shut up, you lying bitch,” spat Vera. “You don’t even feel contrition, do you? Get out.”
“I want to see him.”
“You will never see him.”
I looked down, trying to marshal my broken thoughts. “He’s my father—”
“He’s not your father, as you were no daughter to him. This family disowns you and forgets your name. Get out of here, and go to Hell where your demon master lives. You can ask him to call you ‘daughter,’ as you spread your legs for him again.”
My throat closed up, tight and dry. I knew there were no words left. I turned away. But as I reached for the door handle, I heard Josif’s voice once more.
“Don’t think you’re getting away with it, girl. The evil thing you did will not be unavenged. Vera’s uncle may have left no male kin to cleanse his family name, but there are other ways.”
I looked back over my shoulder. I wished I hadn’t.
“We will tell them.” Vera rose to her feet. “We will go to the Church and tell them the secret that was kept so long. Josif has relatives among the bishops. They will listen. They will know what to do to wipe this stain of evil from the face of God’s green Earth—and to take you with it. You will pay.”
I walked out of the room.
I walked out of the hospital.
I walked three blocks before I reached a junction. There was a Communist-era statue there commemorating some ancient political victory—the winning of our freedom from the Austrians, perhaps, or the Turks, or the Fascists. It showed a huge bronze eagle hovering over a stone crag, a broken chain dangling from one foot.
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