JEGUDIEL: A Deadly Virtues Novel

by Cole, Tillie

  Diel tensed, but Uriel shook his head at his best friend and said, “Or don’t.”

  “Raphe, you have to side with me on this one,” Bara said. “Fucking is your thing. Sex and hedonism and all that mortal-sin shit.”

  A bright smile of agreement appeared on Raphael’s face. Maria shook her head at her lover, and Raphael in turn just kissed her again, his hand wrapping around the lengths of her incredibly long hair. “Only with you, little rose,” he said against her mouth.

  Gabriel appeared at Diel’s bedside. Worry was obvious in his expression. “Are you okay with this, brother?” Gabriel’s crucifix hung like an omen around his neck. He was the only one of the Fallen who ever put any trust in that well-known cross, the only one, bar Maria, who saw it as anything but a symbol of their repressive childhoods.

  The pain in Diel’s head had downgraded to a low hum, obvious but not crippling. Diel was a killer. He felt no guilt for taking someone’s life; in fact he relished it. There was no feeling of fear when he killed. But in that moment, the fear of unlocking his past blazed in his heart like an arrow. Fear of what horrors he might discover when the mental blockage was removed. But he just nodded.

  Gabriel laid his hand over Diel’s free one. “Perhaps this will give your soul peace. Perhaps …” Gabriel nodded as if agreeing with a silent thought. “Perhaps this was the real key to your salvation all along.”

  “Yeah,” Diel managed to say, though he was pretty sure that key to salvation was lying next to him, gripping his hand tightly as if she feared he would fall away if she let go.

  Diel thought he just might.

  “I’ll be praying over you as this happens,” Gabriel promised, his rosary already in hand.

  Diel didn’t care for prayer, didn’t give a fuck for religion of any kind, but he cared for Gabriel. Just then, the bedroom door opened, and Naomi, Candace and Jo came back inside. Naomi had a small bag in her hands. She approached the bed timidly.

  “Can I stay here with him?” Noa asked her sister.

  Naomi nodded, and Gabriel motioned for his brothers to give her some space. Only Sela stayed beside the bed, leaning against the wall by the headboard. Naomi placed the bag on the bed right next to Diel’s leg. She pulled out a small flashlight. The room was so silent they could have heard a pin drop.

  Naomi closed her eyes and took several deep breaths. Noa was a statue beside Diel, her worry for Naomi obvious by her tense body. Naomi’s hands were shaking, but when she opened her eyes, she stood and turned to face the rest of the room.

  She opened and closed her mouth several times before she said, “Pl … please be … si-silent.” Noa’s breathing hitched at the sound of her sister speaking aloud. Diel could clearly hear that some of Naomi’s tongue had been cut off. She had a heavy, thick lisp. Her lips tried to form around words in lieu of what the tongue should naturally do, and it was clear by her weak voice that she rarely spoke, as if her vocal cords were stiff from disuse. There was a heavy dose of embarrassment in it too, of fear of what the people in the room would think.

  Diel saw a wave of proud smiles pour toward her from her sisters … then she turned back to him.

  Noa’s hand tightened to its maximum strength around his. Naomi swallowed again, another build-up to speaking aloud. “I am going to hypnotize you,” she said. Diel concentrated hard to pick out exactly what she was saying. Some of her words were muffled, difficult to decipher. “I will try my best to unlock what is plaguing your dreams.” She gave him a flicker of a smile. “I will try to give you some answers … some peace.” Diel nodded, and Naomi sat beside him, her petite body stiff. “I will have to touch you.” He felt his body lock up, repelling it. But Noa ran her thumb up and down the back of his hand in comfort. He turned to her. She nodded at him in encouragement.

  Diel took a deep breath. He wouldn’t hurt Naomi. Noa trusted he wouldn’t hurt her sister. He had to trust himself too.

  He turned back to Naomi. She held the flashlight up and switched it on. A bright red dot shone directly into his eyes, making him flinch. “Stare into the light.”

  Diel fought through his discomfort and stared at the red light. “Just keep staring at the light, don’t look away.” Naomi’s heavy lisp and odd way of pronouncing words sounded like a lullaby of sorts to Diel’s ears; her tone was melodic. His tight body began to loosen as that red dot became all that he could see, its hazy walls swelling to engulf the room.

  His brothers faded away to nothing—even his hand in Noa’s no longer became all he could feel. It was as if the red light brought warmth, like the relieved feeling of being caught out in the winter rain and then sinking into a deep hot bath afterward.

  His eyes lost focus on the light, and he felt a rhythmic tapping on the back of his free hand. The light mixed with the tapping and Naomi’s soft instructions made his body begin to relax, tension seeping out of him. He took deep, slow inhales and exhales when Naomi told him to.

  “You are feeling relaxed,” a soft voice said, the owner of that voice fading from his consciousness too. “The pain in your body and mind are melting away to nothing, leaving behind only peace. Leaving behind only a sense of calm.” Diel breathed evenly. He felt as though he was leaving his body, present but at the same time not. “Listen to my voice,” she said again. “Nod your head if you understand me.” Diel felt his head move, like it was moving of its own accord. Everywhere was dark now, but not the darkness he was used to. This dark was warm—not a sea of destruction, but small, rippling currents of blissful numbness.

  “We’re going to go back to the day you entered Purgatory.” The voice seemed to bring him to a hallway of doors. It guided him to one right in front of him. “In a moment, I’m going to ask you to open it. But unlike in your past, there will be no pain here, no panic.” Diel stared at the door before him. “Open the door to Purgatory.”

  Diel stepped forward and pushed it open. He was descending stone steps. He could feel the priests at his back. His heart was racing and his head kept ticking from side to side. He didn’t let them lead him away easily. Diel fought and fought against their hold, something inside of him stirring, growing in strength, telling him to tear them apart. To get back to where he was meant to be. Diel frowned. He couldn’t think where that was. But he couldn’t be in this place. He had to go back … back … something waited for him wherever he had come from …

  “Come back into the room of doors,” the voice said, and Diel left the steps to Purgatory and walked back into the large hallway. He felt a pull to a door at his right. “Go to the door that is calling you.” Diel moved toward the door that had a light shining underneath it, beckoning him through. He had to go through there. He knew he did. But as he placed his hand on the doorknob, something pulled in his stomach, and his heart thudded and pain burned in his temples. Diel hissed, gripping at his head—

  “You feel no pain,” the voice said again, sterner. He felt tapping on his hand, a steady, rhythmic beat that his heart clung to and began to imitate. “There is nothing to fear behind that door. If it is calling for you, go through it.” Diel turned back to the door, the pain in his head once again numbed.

  He reached out, took hold of the doorknob and stepped inside. He blinked as he looked around the small room. He was in a shack of some sort. Dilapidated walls dripped with damp; the panels of wood were chipped and covered in rotting paint and mold. It smelled of smoke and dankness and fear.

  The furniture was old and ripped, cigarette-burned and marked. The two couches were small and barely fit for purpose. Diel felt his mouth moving, speaking aloud exactly what he was seeing.

  “And what else can you see?” the voice replied.

  Diel walked through the living room into a kitchen. The cabinets were no longer white, but speckled with flecks of fat from the frying pan and yellow with tobacco stains. He stopped at the door. His head tilted to the side as he saw a man and woman sitting at a table, empty liquor bottles and half-smoked cigarettes scattered around them. There were ne
edles on the table too, and bands tied around the woman’s arms. A needle stuck out from her flesh; her eyes were glazed and her lips were parted, head tipped backward, awake but not present.

  He turned when he heard a floorboard creak behind him. Diel’s eyes narrowed on the young boy who walked through. He was a walking skeleton. He had a thick crop of dark hair and large, sunken blue eyes that seemed to see everything.

  “Does he live there?” the voice asked. Diel nodded. The little boy lived there. The woman was his mother, but she was a bad one. She didn’t love him; he didn’t love her. He had raised himself. The man wasn’t his father. Just another abusive jerk in his mother’s life. The boy hated the man. He beat him. He—

  Diel heard soft singing coming from the back from the house. It immediately filled him with light. He turned and followed the sound, walking through the dark hallway into a tiny room with two stained and filthy sheetless mattresses on the floor.

  Diel paused in the doorway. A little girl sat on one mattress. She was playing with a doll. The doll was old and missing an arm and a leg. One of its eyes was painted an ice-blue color, and red pen covered one side of its face. The little girl had long dark hair and was wearing a dress riddled with holes and sullied with dirt.

  She looked up and stared right at him. Diel couldn’t move, the air in his lungs escaping. “You’re back,” the little girl said, and he felt his heart beat fast once again. The girl smiled widely at him, and he felt something inside him crack. Because she was like the doll. Half of her face was covered with a deep red birthmark, the eye on that side an ice-blue color compared to the dark blue of the other.

  Blind, Diel realized. She was blind in one eye.

  “You’re back!” she said again in relief, and something made him want to hold her in his arms. But then the half-starved boy from the living room rushed through and sat beside her on the mattress. He took her in his arms, and Diel couldn’t look away from them. “Finn,” she whispered, utter relief in her tone. “I’m so happy you’re back.”

  “Cara,” the boy, Finn, said in response. “Did he touch you? Did he hurt you?” The boy’s voice was familiar to Diel, but he didn’t know why. Then the boy’s head ticked to the side, and his eyes blinked in rapid succession.

  Diel felt a crack splinter down his chest as he watched him, as he watched them both. As he saw the boy sit beside her in her bed, a protective arm around her shoulders. Diel knew that the mattress next to her was the boy’s. The two children hid away in this tiny, filthy box of a room while their mother got high. They didn’t attend school. They’d taught themselves to read and write. No one knew or even cared that they lived there, miles from anyone else.

  Diel stayed in the doorway as the boy put his little sister to bed. Darkness fell outside, but the boy sat all night, staring at the door, a knife hidden under his bed just in case the man tried to come in.

  He was guarding his sister from the man outside.

  His mother hid her away from the outside world; she forever stayed stuck in that tiny room. The mother and the man mocked her for her birthmark. They neglected her needs enough that when an eye disease came to the eye on the marked side of her face, they didn’t get her help. They let her lose her sight in that eye, told her she deserved it … and she remained hidden away, a lost, sweet soul.

  Sweat dripped down Diel’s neck. His pulse fired into a heady beat as he stared at that boy. He felt what that boy felt inside. Rage. So much darkness and rage and—

  “Go back into the hallway,” the voice told him, and Diel made his feet walk back through the shack and out into the hallway of doors. He wanted to go back. He wanted to go back and be with the children. He wanted to help the children. But the door to his left pulled him close this time. He couldn’t stop thinking of the boy with the knife under his bed and death in his soul, or the little girl with the birthmark and one blind eye, but the other door compelled him to look inside.

  “Enter the door,” the voice said. Diel stepped through. And he was met with carnage. Blood covered the shack’s floor. The drug-addicted mother was on the floor, eyes open with a bullet wound in her head. The man had the small girl over the kitchen countertop, a gun at her head. “You ugly little shit.”

  Those words were a flint to Diel’s tinder. He shook as he stood in the doorway. He went to step forward, the scene feeling more than familiar to him, when—

  “Let her go.” The boy walked into the room. Darkness flickered in his eyes, a darkness Diel recognized. One that he knew. It looked remarkably like the monster that lived within him. Diel watched the boy find a knife on the counter and hide it behind his back. Diel felt a spark of pride in his chest. He wanted the boy to hurt the man.

  Diel looked at the young girl. She was petrified, and Diel fought to keep his feet planted to the ground. He wanted to whisk her away, take her away from the man and to somewhere safe, then return to this shack and join the young boy in killing the man. Gutting him like the pig he was.

  The boy struck. He plunged the knife into the man’s neck. Blood spattered the walls and the floor of the kitchen. A cold smile etched onto Diel’s lips as the boy kept stabbing. As he became drenched in blood and fragments of bone and muscle and flesh. As his blue eyes shone brighter as the man beneath him became unrecognizable under his hands.

  “Finn.” A broken, terrified sound came from across the room. But the boy was lost to bloodlust. Diel felt it too, that power that came with ending a life, the euphoria that swelled the veins as a body became dismembered by your very hands. “Finn …” The small voice was cracking now, losing strength. “Finn … please …”

  The boy suddenly stopped, the voice cutting through his blanket of darkness. He turned, knife still in his blood-drenched hand. Diel followed his gaze. Across the room, the little girl was crouched low, tucked into a corner, tears tracking down her face. The boy froze and stared at her. Then the knife dropped slowly from his hand.

  “Cara,” he said, voice hoarse and losing the rage that had swept over him. He stepped forward, and the girl watched him with wide eyes. There wasn’t a part of the boy that wasn’t covered in blood. Only the whites of his eyes remained clean. He crouched down to meet the girl.

  She raked her gaze around the room. “Mommy’s gone.” Diel looked at the mother, who was most certainly dead, no doubt by the man’s hands.

  “We’re going to be okay, Cara. I’ll fix it. I’ll take care of us. I promise. We’re … we’re free …”

  Then Diel heard the front door open.

  “Mrs. Nolan?”

  The boy’s head whipped up and his mouth parted in panic. Diel’s heart began racing. Someone was coming. Someone the boy didn’t want to see. The girl reached forward and grabbed the boy’s arm. Her pure, clean hand became tainted with blood. But she didn’t seem to care.

  The boy tried to move, his head flicking around the room as he tried to think of what to do, what to say. But then Diel saw the man come into focus. Every part of Diel began to shake—with rage, with fear, with the need to pick the children up and run away. Take them from harm.

  “Father Burke,” the little girl said. The man’s eyes drank in the scene before him. Then he turned his unwavering gaze onto the boy. The boy had placed himself in front of the girl.

  “Get back,” the boy said. His head ticked from side to side, eyes blinking too fast as that darkness, that inner monster he possessed, clawed to the surface.

  Father Burke touched the children’s mother with his foot, only for her dead corpse to flop back down to the ground. A smirk tugged onto his mouth. “I came to see if your mother and stepfather had thought any more about their sobriety.” The priest edged further into the room, right past Diel. Diel tried to reach out and grab him, to wrench him back, but his hands couldn’t find purchase.

  Diel’s breathing was choppy as the priest headed directly for the boy. The priest stopped dead before him and said, “You think I didn’t see there was a demon in your soul the first time I came here?”
He looked past the boy to the girl, who was silently crying, gripping the boy’s soiled shirt like her life depended on it. “Both of you. Kissed by Satan himself, hidden away in this backward slice of the world.”

  Diel shook his head. No, no, no …

  The priest took out his cell and sent someone a message. He looked at the knife on the ground, then at the man who was nothing but a pile of ground-up flesh.

  “Leave us alone,” the boy said, his voice laced with threat.

  The priest held up a crucifix. Diel frowned. It wasn’t a normal crucifix; its pattern was markedly different. The Christ had a “B” carved into his chest. “You have been found, demon,” the priest said to the boy. “And you will be cleansed of your evil. Cast back from where you came by God’s true servants.”

  The boy rushed forward to reach for the knife on the ground. But the priest grabbed his throat, and the boy’s weakened, starved state made him no match for the larger man. The priest lifted the boy off the floor, and Diel felt his head ticking from side to side, his hands balling into fists. Still the boy struck, fighting to protect his sister, who cried harder as she watched her brother in pain.

  The priest dropped the boy to the ground; his body slipped on the blood. Then the door opened again, and Diel turned to see two more priests walking in.

  “Police?” one of the priests asked, not even flinching at the dead bodies or blood-coated walls.

  Father Burke shook his head, a grin on his face. “Not out here in the middle of nowhere. An easy capture for once.” One of the priests headed toward the girl. She froze, a deer in headlights.

  “No.” The boy tried to get to his feet, slipping on the blood as if his soles were flooded with oil. The priest picked up the girl.

  Diel’s heart beat faster and faster as the boy’s voice rose in volume and he scrambled to stand. The boy charged after the priest, but Father Burke held his arms behind his back. The boy fought and fought, tears making tracks through the drying blood on his face. The girl began to thrash as the priest led her toward the door.