“Shut the fuck up,” said the gunman to me. “He’s not the one we have to bring back in one piece.” He grinned and took a step closer to Egan, the weapon muzzle pointed directly at his face, and switched to English. “Unless you’ve got a hotline to the Egrigoroi too, friend?”
I had no choice, did I? I did the only thing I could think of. “Azazel!” I screamed: “Help me!”
Azazel heard.
He came.
chapter ten
AN EVIL CRADLING
Our boat, wallowing in the water, shook from stem to stern under the impact of Azazel’s arrival. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he was, crouched on top of the cabin roof, looking down on us.
All the electric lights went out.
He was not in a kindly mood. Behind him the starry sky wrinkled into rip-lines like the pinions of mighty wings, but the light that bled in upon us from that other place beyond was a deep red, and it lit the whole scene with a bloody crimson hue. His eyes caught that light and glowed like rubies, and a heat-haze shudder in the air made his form shimmer.
“Let her go,” he said, with a voice of rocks rending a keel.
The slab-faced guy turned and fired at him. At that slight distance, he could hardly miss, especially with an automatic pistol. The roar of the gun was horrific.
I never saw Azazel move. He just suddenly had his hand out in front of him and he was opening it to look disparagingly at the contents. “I gave you the secrets of metal,” he said. “You think you can use them against me?” He turned his palm and a dozen bullets dropped to the deck.
Around us, the surface of the sea began to hiss and fume, and bubbles broke the surface as the salt water began to boil.
Then he jumped down from the cabin roof—lightly, it seemed, but the boat groaned and shuddered under his feet. Tall and lean-hipped, and poised like a cage fighter on the balls of his feet, he turned toward me. Every step vibrated with pent-up violence. The air shook around him. The priest had found his voice and started to pray loudly, but Azazel took no notice.
Then the slab-faced guy stepped between me and him. Maybe he thought fists would work where bullets didn’t. He never got the chance to try. Azazel’s hand was on his throat in less than the blink of an eye.
There was a crunch. I will remember that noise in my nightmares until my dying day. It was the sound of a life being snuffed out.
The guy slid to the deck, feet drumming spasmodically, and there was red pumping out, there was red on…on…
On Azazel’s hand.
Men were shouting in terror. I don’t know how I had time to look in Egan’s direction, but I saw his expression—mouth open, eyes full of horror—before I focused abruptly on the hand Azazel held out to me.
His hand was gloved in blood. It looked almost black in that crimson light.
“She is mine,” he told them all.
The men holding me fell away. I stepped forward into his reach. Then I turned and stretched my own arms to Egan. “Egan, quickly! Come here!”
“Milja!”
Azazel’s arm wrapped around my shoulders.
“Egan!” I screamed. “Save him too!”
The boat and the sea and the night went away.
My cry left me airless, but when I tried to inhale there was nothing to breathe—nothing at all in a between-space that seemed to go on and on—no air, no light, nothing beneath my feet. Panic swept me and I arched in Azazel’s arms.
Then his mouth was against mine, and he was breathing into me. He tasted of smoke and pepper and ire, but he filled my lungs and held me safe. And when, all of a sudden, the world came back, and sounds burst on my ear and warm air smote my cheek and light made me shut my eyes, he still held me. His lips carried on moving against mine, but now with burning kisses. And my feet still swung clear of anything solid, because he was holding me up, taking my weight easily.
It was the first time he’d ever made me feel safe.
I broke the kiss, reluctantly, just to gasp.
“You left that late,” he growled, kissing me again. “What if I hadn’t been fast enough?”
I nodded frantically, pressing my lips to his and then rasping my cheek with his dark stubble. Relief had followed panic like the suck of a withdrawing wave, and it was nearly as hard to deal with as the fear.
“How did you get into that sort of trouble? What did those men want?”
That snapped me back to reality. I opened my eyes. “Don’t you know?”
Azazel set me on my feet, holding me carefully until I was sure of my balance, and shook his head, frowning. We were on a rooftop, in a city. A street of tall, familiar-looking houses scrolled away behind me in the blue dusk.
“They want you, I think,” I said numbly, looking around and not paying much attention to my own words. “Where is this?”
“You are home.”
“Boston?” My voice shot up an octave. “Where’s Egan?”
He shrugged. Without the trappings of his anger he looked human again.
“Is he still on the boat? Azazel! You have to go back and get him too!”
“Why?”
“Oh please—they have him held prisoner! They might kill him or anything!”
He lifted one dark eyebrow, still waiting for an explanation.
“For God’s sake!” The exclamation was singularly inappropriate, but I pushed on. “He was trying to help me—he saved me over and over from those men. He was trying to get me out of the country!”
Azazel looked amused, and the tilt of his head was disconcertingly bestial as he started to circle me. “I’m not surprised. The reek of his lust is all over you.”
That took me aback. My voice collapsed to a whisper. “That’s not true. He’s a good friend.”
“So I recall.” Sarcasm was certainly not beyond an angel’s repertoire. “Such good men are hard to find, I understand. And he was certainly hard when you found him.”
Oh, not that. “It was just a dream,” I said through gritted teeth, “and that was your show anyway.”
He laughed. “No. Not mine. How you furnish your dreams is entirely down to you. What was that thing with the ugly striped shirt?”
“But…” What does he mean?
“I enjoyed playing along,” he admitted. “And you seemed to find it exciting.”
I did, oh I did. Why was he distracting me when Egan was in terrible danger?
“That’s all I wanted,” Azazel said with a mockingly humble gesture. “Your pleasure is my pleasure.”
I grabbed at the chance. “Then save Egan now. That’s my pleasure. Please.”
“You care for him?”
Goddamn. I was growing frantic. He seemed absolutely determined to lead the conversation astray. “Yes!”
All the amusement left Azazel’s eyes, like a light going out, and he quit pacing. “Why? He is not me.”
Under the glint of that whetted-steel regard I felt a chill. “I care for lots of people,” I said. “Animals too. And places.”
He loomed in over me. “But you love only me.”
Love? You’re talking about love, now? There was something oddly naive in his simplistic demand. Something desperately insecure. And that was not reassuring.
“Azazel, you can’t tell people who to love. It has to be given freely.”
“Hm.” He nodded, his mouth twisted, as if my words carried an import that meant more to him than I knew, something dark and horrible. He reached out to touch my face, soft as the brush of black feathers. “But I love you.”
Never had the declaration sounded more ominous.
“You mean that?”
“Milja, I never lie to you.”
My voice shook. “If you really loved me, you’d save my friend.”
I could not have picked a worse thing to say. It was like pressing the red button marked detonate. It was like pulling a trigger I had not known was there. The air crackled and darkness rose behind him like wings, as he grabbed my jaw and crushed in s
o close that for one horrible moment I thought he was going to bite my face.
“Do not do that!” he roared. “Do not ever do that! You are not God!”
Then he thrust me away, so hard that I staggered and went down, catching myself on one knee. When I dared look, Azazel was pacing back and forth, eyes wide, sweat beading his forehead. He wiped at his face as if trying to pull off something that clung to him, and stared at me. He looked horribly angry—and sick with fear.
“Don’t,” he began again, much quieter; “just don’t…” He lost his thread. “I apologize. I am too rough.”
“Yeah,” I rasped. “That’s an understatement.”
“I don’t want to hurt you, Milja. I don’t want to see you hurt, ever. You are the one I love.”
“Right.”
“In the darkness, you were light. I reached out through the hurt… everything was cold and pain, and you were warmth and relief. Like a candle flame in the night. You heard me. You heard my voice and you held me and you soothed me and you loved me, and that was everything. The whole world. You were my strength and my hope and my God. My life. My love.”
I shook my head, heavy with rejection. “I don’t think you love me,” I said. My voice was a croak, cold with rage. “I think you get off on me. I think you use me.” I was remembering what Egan and Uriel had said. “You took advantage of a lonely girl because that was all you had to work with. You turn me on because that’s what you feed off. You’re just fine with me getting dirty with Egan, but only so long as I don’t get so fond of him that I forget you. You’re like some kind of vampire, only for desire and love, not blood. You’re feeding off me, because it’s what keeps you alive.”
He took a step closer. “Isn’t that what all lovers are?” he asked, and some part of me was startled to hear his voice tremble. “We love those who love us. It makes us happy when they are happy. We flourish under their affection.”
“You think I feel any affection for you right now?” I didn’t care how dangerous it was to say those words; they gave me too much satisfaction. “You’re this horrible monster, Azazel. You kill people without a second thought.” I flicked a glance at his hand, but there was no telltale blood on it anymore.
“I saved you,” he said, looking confused. I ignored him.
“But you know what’s worse? Underneath the monster, what you really are is just a selfish prick.”
I braced myself for the explosion.
It didn’t come. Azazel stood there and looked at me and just went still—far stiller than any human could. He didn’t even breathe. Somehow, without shifting a millimeter, he made me feel like I was seeing him withdraw, pulling away and away and away, like a man falling from a great height.
Then there was a crump of displaced air and he was gone. Just like that. No threats, no spite, no cold passive-aggressive snipe at me.
Just gone.
A rumble of thunder rolled from west to east overhead, and big dark drops of rain began to fall. I saw the blackish blotches appear on the asphalt. A coppery tang rose from the wet dust. Only when the first droplet struck my hand did I realize the rain was warm—and red.
I was on the roof of my own apartment building in Boston.
It was raining blood.
And I had no way, no way at all, of finding or helping or reaching out to the man who had risked his life to save me, the man who I’d abandoned to die, an ocean and more away.
For a week, I barely left my apartment. For much of that week I lay curled up in bed with Senka the cat, staring blankly at the wall. I slept in fits and starts, woke up over and over in the middle of the night and paced about the silent rooms, then dozed again as daylight first grayed the sky. My head, even when it wasn’t throbbing, felt like it was filled with wadded cloth, like an overfull laundry basket. My stomach churned and ached as I alternated between stuffing it with any food I could find and not eating at all. I lay on the sofa watching the shopping channels on TV, their mindless steady pap the only input I could bear.
On the few occasions I flicked by mistake to a news channel, the airwaves seemed full of disaster and omens. Vicious rebels surfaced in South America and the Middle East and were met with ruthless reprisals. Another hurricane swept through the Caribbean and grounded on Florida, swamping the low land and driving people from their ruined homes. An earthquake in one of the ex-USSR ’stan countries—Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, I don’t recall which—flattened an ancient city and destroyed a World Heritage Site. Bird flu raised its head again in China. Evangelicals thumped their Bibles and predicted the Day of Judgment any time now and blamed gay marriages in California.
Was this Azazel’s work—or was the world always prone to this chaos, and suddenly I was noticing?
Suzana hovered and fussed, prickling with frustration. I had no explanations for her—not for how I’d got back, or what had happened, or what was wrong, or what I thought I was doing right now. Certainly no explanation for that crazy-ass rainstorm on Boston that was the talk of the Christian Internet. I told her my father had passed away, but refused to confide in her or to make contact with my employer, or more likely ex-employer. And she desperately wanted to leave: she had tickets to Burning Man in Nevada with her boyfriend, it was a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and I’d arrived back just in time to screw everything up.
“Go,” I told her wearily. We were pretty good friends as roomies go, but not so close I had any right to mess up her life. “I’ll be fine.”
For days the most positive thing I managed was to slouch to the store at the corner to buy milk and breakfast cereal, and I only did that when I found myself eating cold fava beans out of a tin because I had nothing else in my cupboard.
I didn’t dream. Not the pellucid, burning dreams about Azazel anyway—just ordinary muddled visions of guilt and terror, in which I saw again the red-lit deck of the boat and Egan’s horrified face. And heard him cry my name in despair.
I’d abandoned him.
And now Azazel had abandoned me.
I was full of such anger at first—bitterly angry at Azazel’s stubbornness, and at his utter lack of compassion. Blame and guilt roiled inside me, gnawing at my guts. It was quite possible that I wouldn’t be alive if it weren’t for Egan, yet Azazel showed no gratitude to the man who’d looked after his pet mortal. He claimed to love me, but wouldn’t do the one thing I desperately needed him to do.
I’d begged him, and he’d refused.
Well, not exactly begged him. More…
As the hours and the days wore on, a razor-edge of doubt began to creep beneath my righteousness, cutting it loose as a scalpel severs meat from bone. You are not God! he’d told me, his rage erupting out of nowhere. Almost like panic.
If you really loved me, I’d said… What was wrong with that?
What was wrong with trying to make him do the right thing?
Was he, I wondered, readying some sort of revenge now? It hardly seemed to matter to me. I was in such black misery I couldn’t imagine anything I feared more. It was entirely my fault that Egan was in danger. I was as helpless now as I had been in the face of my father’s passing, but this time the accusations came from within, not from any distraught relatives. This time I couldn’t say You’ve got it wrong, it wasn’t me!
It was me.
My self-righteousness fell away and I was left with the bare bones of my guilt. I was still angry with Azazel, but after I came across a book on Suzana’s shelf at three in the morning, I couldn’t even condemn him anymore. I started reading listlessly just because I couldn’t sleep; it was the autobiography of a man who’d been abducted in Beirut and held prisoner in close confinement and near darkness for four years. Claustrophobia reeked from every page. The experience had left him with memories and mental scar tissue that it made me ache to imagine.
I closed the book hours later, my eyes dry and aching and my heart heavy. Dawn lay upon the city like a gray blanket. I weighed the prison imagery of the memoir like coins of a denomination I’d never
used before and did not know how to spend.
Azazel had suffered his own captivity for millennia. Could anyone come out of that undamaged? I asked myself. Wasn’t I simply asking the impossible when I demanded he act like any ordinary decent soul?
Later that day I had the dream—my one proper dream, and it wasn’t even dirty, fortunately, because I found myself in no place to lose my clothes. I was standing in a snowdrift on a mountaintop—and I do mean mountaintop, because below and all around me stretched a vast range of peaks, all bare black rock and sheer slopes of snow. I think it must have been just before dawn; there was enough light to see by but it was blue as an old bruise, and the wind was up and blowing snow, like smoke, from the top of the drifts.
I swear I could see the curve of the horizon.
Somehow, though it gave me no discomfort in my dream, I knew that we were so high up that there was almost no air to breathe. And it should have been unbearably cold, of course, but I felt this as nothing more than an abstract fact.
Azazel was sitting on an exposed crag of rock, his hands loose on his thighs, his head a little bowed. He must have been there some while, because the snow had drifted up against his back and rime had frozen in the hair that hung, fluttering against his bare cheek, in thick webs of frost. He was motionless but for the wind-blown edges of hair and clothes, yet his eyes were open—though it was hard to tell whether it was the incredible landscape they were fixed upon, or the pitiful patch of bright orange that lay in the drift before him. It took a long hard look before I was able to resolve that into a pair of legs clad in padded climbing gear, and a gloved and equally padded arm crooked about an oxygen cylinder. The top part of the body was buried in snow, rendering it faceless.
Azazel’s bare feet, insensible to the cutting cold, seemed to mock the frozen corpse.
“What did he do to annoy you?” I asked grimly. The buffeting hiss of the wind snatched my words away and for a moment I thought he hadn’t heard.
Then he turned his head to look at me, his mouth compressing to a hard line. For a moment I read hurt in his silvery gaze, before he stood without a word and walked away from me, over the top of the snow, leaving no prints.
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