Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  “You actually eat those things?”

  Using my teeth to tear open the wrapper, I ignored her and bent back to the paper.

  “I’ve got holes in my memory you could drive an oil tanker through,” I admitted, “but not usually when it comes to raw data. What makes you say Luwian?”

  Lil tried to drag her eyes away from the sight of the protein bar, a curl of disgust reaching one nostril.

  “Just trust me. I know these symbols. They’re from one of the ethnic cultures the mountain-fortress people gobbled up.” She straightened, rolling her neck until the vertebrae cracked. From the look of thinly suppressed fury on her features, there was more to the story, but she didn’t elaborate. Typical Lil.

  “All right,” I acknowledged. “So we have a name tied to a culture. That gives me a general idea of how to Google-whack this guy. Maybe he has some mythic weaknesses. What’s the rest of it say?”

  “The usual chest-beating deity stuff,” she responded. Adopting a mockingly bombastic tone, she read, “‘I am the Conqueror, mighty and glorious. Tarhunda is my name.’”

  Terhuziel, my brain corrected, but I managed to keep it to myself. Lil shot me a look like she knew better. Flipping rapidly through the other pages, she continued, almost bored, “‘My breath is the breath of the storm. I rule over land and sky. All bow before my power.’ Blah, blah, blah. You get the picture.” She tossed the stack casually onto the counter beside the first one.

  Her recitation, mocking as it was, unearthed a full-body flashback to the voice outside of Lake View. Rattled, I covered it by making a show of very carefully balancing the wrapper of the energy bar on the mound of garbage in my trash.

  “So this is an ancient god speaking through an autistic girl?” I quipped, still fighting to shake off the memory. “Wait till I break that to the padre.”

  Lil smacked me lightly on the arm. “No, Einstein. He only thinks he’s a god. That’s why I’m saying Rephaim. The Idol-Riders were all about setting themselves up as central figures of worship. Storm gods were a favorite, because once they settled into a domain, they could influence the weather.”

  “Terael doesn’t do that,” I objected.

  “Probably doesn’t have enough power. It’s not like people make sacrifices to him in the art museum.” She thought about it for a moment. “At least, I hope not,” she amended.

  “Not typically,” I responded, leaving out the matter of three slain doves. “But if you’re right, we’ve got a real problem.”

  “You mean beyond having a rogue Rephaim trying to establish himself somewhere in the city?”

  “Your Tarhunda reads as Terhuziel to me. That’s four syllables,” I said, holding up four digits for emphasis. “That’s a decimus.”

  “Bleeding Mother,” Lil swore. She smacked the paper as if that could somehow transmit her aggravation to the owner of the name—and for all I knew, it might. Names were power, and among the tribes of my people, they embodied our identities, our abilities, and our ranks. Each syllable was a component of our magic, and the more syllables in a Name, the more power that sibling had at his disposal—by increasing orders of magnitude.

  In the books crammed upon my shelves, I’d spilled a lot of ink theorizing about how all of this figured into our natures and our skills, as well as the source we tied back to as a group—because, apparently, we’d lost touch and couldn’t agree on what precisely that origin was. Shut away over the past month, I’d had plenty of time to reacquaint myself with those writings.

  The highest rank in each tribe was the primus. As the title implied, each group had only one. The Names of the primae held a total of five syllables, a base of three appended with a suffix spelled variously –iel, or –ael. No matter how it was spelled, that suffix was a word of power in and of itself, simultaneously expressing what we were and what we’d come from. Regardless of tribe, all the brethren shared that suffix and its otherworldly implications.

  For every primus, there were ten who held the rank of decimus. The name of each decimus was four syllables in length—two for the base, plus the two-syllable suffix. At the bottom of the ladder were grunts like me. Three-syllable Names—we didn’t get any fancy titles.

  If a primus was king of the tribe, a decimus was a lord, except, as far as power went, it was more like warlord, chief, and master-wizard all rolled into one. Dorimiel had been a decimus of the Nephilim, and when I’d faced him last fall, he’d easily wiped the floor with me. Some of that had been the Eye, but even without the ancient icon, the guy had been no slouch. If not for Lil’s timely intervention, he’d have gobbled me up—mind, body, and soul.

  If we had another decimus in town, things could get ugly, fast.

  “I need to pay a visit to Terael,” I said.

  “Ugh.” Lil made no effort to suppress a shudder of revulsion. She harbored such a creeping distaste for the Rephaim, she wouldn’t set foot near his domain inside the Cleveland Museum of Art.

  “Once you get to know him, he’s not that bad,” I insisted.

  “Sure,” she responded, voice ringing with skepticism. “If crazed, omniscient entities whispering inside your head is your thing, then he’s great.”

  “Omniscient is kind of a stretch.” Although hearing her put it that way made me wonder why I hadn’t connected Whisper Man with the Rephaim, and much sooner. That voice in my head had thundered with the same suffocating intensity that Terael sometimes possessed—though ratcheted up to a power of ten.

  Terael wielded near-total influence over the security and electrical systems of the art museum, not to mention having the ability to manipulate the thoughts and dreams of its mortal staff. He’d made the entire security detail sleep through a gunfight, for Pete’s sake. All that, and he considered his powers “diminished.”

  “I really don’t know how you work with that thing in the same building,” Lil grumbled.

  “He’s family,” I objected, then I glanced up at the clock. Almost four. Shit—I’d agreed to meet with Bobby, and I still had to check in with Father Frank. I needed to clone myself or something. At least I had news about the language.

  Harried, I started searching around for my leather jacket. Lil hooked a thumb toward the hall.

  “Bedroom.”

  “Oh, right.” I kind of remembered taking it off back there. Walking back, I grabbed the jacket, checking the SIG as I returned to the kitchen. The in-pocket holster was set for a left-hand draw, and while it wasn’t perfect for quick access, it was still the best bet for concealment, given what I typically wore.

  Lil eyed me as I cinched the buckle at my waist.

  “You had your gun on you last night, and managed to get stabbed anyway?” she inquired archly. “You’ve really let yourself go.”

  I shot her a sour look. “They got the jump on me—literally. I had my hands full… and I got careless,” I admitted. “Didn’t even think I might have people following me. Won’t make that mistake twice.”

  Lil clucked her tongue. “You better pay closer attention today, flyboy, because I’m not going to be there to save your ass.”

  “Who said you were coming with me, anyhow?” I asked, although I’d kind of assumed she would, given Lil’s typical intractability. But she ignored my question.

  “At five thirty, I’m meeting up with the Windy City Vixens. I already ditched them for the tour through the Rock Hall to make sure you didn’t wake up dead. I’m at least catching dinner with them before they head back home.”

  Again my mind boggled at the thought of Lil in a dance troupe. I could picture her dancing, sure, and burlesque fit her like a slinky velvet glove, but performing with other people? That bit refused to parse.

  “Are these normal ladies you dance with?” I asked, searching for my keys in the pockets. Lil pointed to the stand beside the front door. I moved to grab them, adding, “You know, like mortals?”

  She set her mug in the sink and started collecting her own stuff—car keys, blazer, the clutch purse that always seeme
d brimming with limitless useful items. She paused in front of one of my larger framed pieces—a folio page from a medieval book of hymns—and inspected her reflection in the glass. Ran her fingers through her wealth of dark red curls. Dabbed at the edge of her lipstick.

  “You might hide yourself away with computer games and books, Zaquiel, but I prefer to have a life among people.” Her tone, for once, lacked the usual acerbic bite. “What’s the purpose of immortality if we don’t stop to actually live?”

  I opened my mouth for a witty retort, but had nothing. She zipped up her boots and took her sable driving coat from a hanger in my closet. It was like she’d moved into the place while I slept. Settling the coat on her shoulders, she lifted her wild locks of hair so they cascaded down her back like a scarlet capelet. I had the feeling I was missing something—something terribly pertinent—and if I stared at her just right, comprehension would gel like one of those Magic Eye pictures emerging from visual static.

  For the life of me, though, all I could think of was the way I’d watched Lil stab a corpse repeatedly in the head with an ice pick so it couldn’t become host to a cacodaimon while we both crouched in the murky halls of a retired Navy gunboat. Lil was efficient and brutal and terrifying—and she was being civil to me. There had to be sorcery afoot.

  “You know, you didn’t have to stay and look after me,” I ventured.

  With a deceptively prim gesture, she tucked her little white clutch purse in the crook of an elbow, then shot me a smile that reminded me of a stalking cat.

  “Somebody has to. See you around, flyboy.”

  She let herself out.

  16

  With Lil’s parting words still banging uneasily around in my brain, I headed down to the parking area behind my apartment. I’d meet up with Bobby first, since the station was right near the art museum. Then I’d check in with Terael. If another Rephaim really was present in the city, my statue-bound sibling would sense it—I hoped.

  Terael was fond of pointing out that his perceptions only extended as far as the museum walls, but it was worth a shot. He’d at least have some advice for how to deal with this new presence if, indeed, Whisper Man turned out to be one of the Rephaim. I didn’t know a whole lot about that tribe beyond what I’d observed with Terael. Specifically, I had no idea how to hurt them.

  It was tough enough dealing with Nephilim, who healed so fast that bullets were mostly a nuisance. The Rephaim were disembodied intelligences anchored to stone. “Killing” one didn’t exactly seem like it would be an option. Not that any of us ever stayed dead for very long.

  Maybe I could reason with Whisper Man.

  Yeah, right. I’d have better luck inviting a Sith Lord over for tea.

  Once I had something solid, I’d swing by the hospital and check in with Father Frank. He needed an update on what was going on. He and Sanjeet had probably tried calling me about eighty times already. Hopefully they’d had a less eventful night than I’d had.

  If there was any way to protect Halley from Whisper Man’s influence, I’d do it—even if all I could manage was scribing wards around her hospital bed. The poor girl had enough trouble without one of my bat-shit crazy siblings clawing around inside her head.

  Outside, dirty drifts of snow piled to either side of the asphalt lot. A low building with flat, corrugated roofing squatted near the back. It held four covered spaces for cars. One of them housed my motorcycle and the new car. I hadn’t quite gotten used to thinking of the car as mine. My old one—a lumbering Buick older than most college students—had been stolen the same time everything else in my life went to shit. The Buick never turned back up. For all I knew, it was at the bottom of the lake, too.

  As a kind of consolation prize for her Machiavellian tendencies, my sibling Saliriel had bought me a bright, shiny Dodge Hellcat with more bells and whistles than a locomotive museum.

  I hated it.

  It was a gorgeous vehicle, no denying it, black and sleek with a profile reminiscent of the classic muscle cars from decades past. Some fragment of myself still lingering in my brain clung to a fondness for that type of automobile, and it was a safe bet Saliriel knew more about the previous me than I did. That must have influenced her choice of vehicular bribery.

  When the Hellcat had showed up outside of my apartment building, along with keys, title, and a nicely penned note, I’d almost sent it right back to her. I still considered doing that. Sure, Sal’s machinations had cost me, but the Dodge didn’t match the part of my soul she’d extracted through her oath. To me the car was just another debt, and it was accruing interest with each passing minute.

  Still, the insurance money from the stolen Buick would’ve barely covered a down payment, and I’d lost a lot of hours at work. So I drove the Dodge for the time being. Even I wasn’t crazy enough to ride the motorcycle through a Cleveland winter.

  It hadn’t moved in close to a month, so I sat and let it warm up, sorting through the music I’d tossed on the passenger seat. The Hellcat came with some kind of fancy satellite radio hookup which I’d never bothered to learn. I still owned CDs. Hell, I’d found cassettes and eight tracks in my apartment, and from the range of titles, my musical tastes ran toward the eclectic.

  Mahler. Sinatra. Tool. None of them appealed. I fished around in the divider between the seats, pulling out a battered iPod. I loosed its Gordian tangle of wires, plugging in the important bits. Choosing a playlist at random, I hit shuffle. As Billy Idol’s familiar rebel yell started blasting through the speakers, I pulled onto the street.

  The quickest route to the station was down Mayfield, but that took me past Lake View. So I turned down Euclid Heights instead, and followed it all the way to Carnegie. The amnesia had robbed me of a lot of things, but my knowledge of the city’s many back streets remained intact. As long as I didn’t think too hard about it, I knew exactly where to go. It only got confusing when my knowledge of different time periods overlapped.

  I pulled up to a corner with a traffic light. As the car idled, I glanced to my right, expecting to see a smoke shop. The garish colors of a McDonald’s greeted me instead. A sharp sweep of nostalgia welled up, stealing my breath. I couldn’t say why the place had been important, but I could practically see it still sitting there on the corner, shimmering through the fast food joint like a double-exposure on film.

  I had a feeling that if I peered across to the Shadowside, the smoke shop would still be there, brimming with echoes of long-gone patrons. The patchwork of emotions this conjured was nuanced and complex. Intimations of meaning drifted on the very edge of thought.

  The car behind me honked in irritation. The light was green. It had probably been green for a while. I sped up a little too quickly, feeling haunted by my own ghost.

  Cutting down Stokes, I headed toward the big, rambling church that looked like it had a massive oilcan bolted to the top. It was a fixture in this part of town. The copper roofs—including the unfortunate oilcan-shaped spire—had weathered to a verdant green in the city’s industrial rain, creating an unmistakable profile against the steely gray of the evening’s gathering clouds.

  The station on Chester Avenue was a broad brick affair sprawling on a corner lot. I pulled around the building, finding visitor parking across from a row of squad cars. While Mick Jagger wailed about all his colors turning black, I eased the Hellcat into a space at the back corner of the lot. Killing the engine, I pulled out my SIG, double-checked the safety, then tucked the gun in the glove compartment. If I needed my pistol in the police department, something would’ve gone horribly, horribly wrong.

  The Stones cut off abruptly as I opened the door. I thumbed a button on the fancy remote key fob, and the vehicle chirped twice. Arming the security system while the car sat in the parking lot of a police station seemed excessive. I did it anyway.

  My cowl settled tight across my wings as I walked up the front steps, locking all my mental defenses into place. I’d spent enough time filling out paperwork at this station and I reall
y didn’t want to pick up on any of the emotional echoes that lingered inside its walls. Between the daily frustration of the officers and the ugly stew of anxiety, depravity, and guilt left behind by the worst of their offenders, I was happier feeling a little suffocated.

  Bobby waited for me in the lobby. A compact figure with a slim, wiry build, he had a tightly wound intensity that practically vibrated on a molecular level. If it had been possible to harness the Korean-American officer’s brimming energy, the cops might have leased him to Detroit to help power the failing grid. The instant Bobby caught sight of me, he flashed a cheery smile of such brilliant wattage that I felt like a total dick for ignoring him this long.

  “Hey,” I said, dipping my chin in an understated greeting.

  Bobby swept over to me. I kept my hands stuffed in the pockets of my jacket. Like Father Frank, Bobby didn’t bother trying for a handshake. The little officer—he couldn’t have stood more than five foot four with his shoes on—rocked on his heels, pushing a sweep of gelled bangs back from his eyes. He held his arms out and did a half-turn, as if modeling.

  “Notice anything?” he asked, a smile crinkling the edges of his eyes.

  He wore a neatly pressed gray wool suit paired with a pale-yellow shirt that might have been silk. His blue tie had angled yellow stripes that were actually Minions marching across it, if you looked close enough. The suit looked tailored, and the cut of his wide-legged pants screamed more “club kid” than “gumshoe.”

  “You’re out of uniform?” I asked.

  “No more uniform!” he crowed. “You’re looking at Detective-Investigator Bobby Park.” He swept the edge of his suit jacket back with a flourish and flashed the badge he wore clipped at his belt.

  “Oh, hey,” I responded. “Congratulations.”

  He beamed. “They even put me with my old partner, David Garrett. Can’t wait to re-introduce you two.” He dialed back the smile, and asked, “How’ve you been? Growing your hair out again?”