Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  “I need details, Terael.”

  Maneuvering by touch past the desk, I dropped into the swivel chair, then felt around for my little gooseneck lamp, flipping it on so I could see. The overheads could stay off for now. Terael had his space so well protected, I probably could have flipped on every bank of fluorescents up and down the hall without eliciting the least bit of curiosity from security, but there was no point in pushing my luck.

  “How do I stop him?” I asked. “Can I stop him? You guys have weaknesses, right?”

  Terael dithered in the space, likely debating how much he should share. I ground my teeth, waiting. The clock on my desk read seven twenty-three. How late would the hospital stay open?

  “Terael, I don’t have time for a debate. There’s this girl, Halley. He’s been after her for weeks. Last night he sent his goons to abduct her right out of her house. I need—”

  He didn’t even let me finish. His presence closed on me like a fist, seeking to pluck an image of Halley straight from my brain.

  Girl? Untouched? Pure? Show me. Stinging with emotion, the words were whip-cracks in my mind. I slammed up all my shields.

  “Hey—back off,” I snapped. “We’ve got rules about you digging around in my head without permission.”

  It would be faster. It was almost a whine.

  Despite the protestation, though, he retreated far enough to respect my boundaries, fretting the air like a storm front. Waves of anxiety pulsed from him, palpable even through my shields. An answering throb started up in my temples. Terael could be a literal pain when he got in a mood. Small wonder Lil avoided the museum.

  I miss the days when you allowed me speech directly, my brother. Formless, my thoughts do not wed easily to so human a mind. Let me be made manifest within you.

  The words dragged the air, so dense with layers of meaning they would take me weeks to unpack. Terael clearly expected me to get it all in one go. Wheedling, he pawed my shields like a toddler begging for sweets—except this was a toddler whose presence blanketed the room.

  “Take it down a notch, Terael. I already took a beating once this week,” I said, digging for the Advil I kept in my desk. Three pills left. I swallowed them dry.

  And I stood threatened in the sanctum of my temple, he shot back. The wounded fury radiating from his words elicited a wince. We both seek to rebuff him, do we not? Give me space so I may see this girl and the soldiers sent to claim her.

  “I don’t know what you’re asking,” I replied. “You’re already a voice inside my head.”

  I am more than just a voice, as well you know, my brother.

  “No. I don’t,” I snapped. “My brain doesn’t work right any more, and I’m sick of telling people that.”

  The Rephaim churned the air with impatience.

  “I’m not being willfully dense, Terael.” Aggravation made me nearly yell it.

  Bounded by the architecture of your mind, my thoughts will be… easier, he said. To bear. To understand.

  That would be nice for a change. I kept the thought to myself.

  “You’re going to have to spell it out, Terael—and be specific.”

  Will you allow me this?

  “Allow you what?” I snapped.

  To be specific.

  Something in his tone rang oddly. It set my hackles up—and I was already pretty close to high alert. Picking at the blotter on my desk, I glanced again at the clock. Seven thirty. Fuck. “Will it make this conversation go any faster?”

  Much.

  “Fine, then,” I relented. “Get on with it.”

  In answer, he flooded my head with pictures. Rooms and halls built from memories. How to pace the perimeter, walls to set the boundaries. Brick and stone and steel, crafted all from thought. The entire layout unfolded in an instant. It was a blueprint for a mental construct, what Giordano Bruno had called a “Theater of Memory.”

  This.

  I dug a palm against my temple. Images still swam behind my eyes as the data unspooled. “Ow!”

  You said I could.

  “I did,” I admitted, feeling like an idiot. “How the hell will that help Halley?”

  When you send your thoughts to me, you show me what you think, yet not always what you have seen. I started to object, but he bulled right over me. You have said it yourself. Your mind is hobbled and you no longer understand things as once you did, my brother. Yet details linger unrecognized within your halls of memory. If I can see as you have seen, I may help you comprehend.

  I chewed my cheeks, debating an answer. He framed a pretty argument, but I still felt leery. Letting him that deep into my mind—how was I supposed to keep any secrets? There were things I loathed to share, like what happened outside of Lake View.

  My reservations were clear enough. He was keen to put my mind at ease, which only made me warier.

  The boundaries are yours to set. This is not a new thing, brother.

  “First you’ve mentioned it since I came back,” I grumbled. Suspicion clung thickly to the words.

  I had no need before. This helps us both, he insisted.

  Pushing back in the swivel chair, I cracked my neck to relieve the tension that clawed at the base of my skull. The vertebrae crackled like bubble-wrap.

  “If I agree to do this, I’m not swearing to anything, right?” I ventured. “I’ve had it up to here with oaths.”

  You and I stood in armies opposed more often than we stood as allies in the distant past. Yet no oaths were sworn to grant you access to my temple. If I can welcome to my halls a zealot judge who smashed the idols of my brethren together with the war-crazed Gibburim, then you can deign to lease me space within your mind so we may more clearly speak.

  That was an interesting chunk of information. In my notes, the Gibburim bore the sobriquet of “Violent Ones,” but beyond that, I knew next to nothing about the tribe. I filed a mental note to ask Terael about them later. For now, the clock was ticking.

  “This is a one-time deal,” I cautioned. “I’ll make this space in my head like you showed, but don’t assume you can waltz in like you own the place whenever the mood strikes.”

  I accept your terms, Zaquiel.

  As he intoned my Name, spectral sounds of wind and distant music tinkled through the little office. Not quite spectral—the breeze stirred my hair, blowing long strands back from my forehead.

  Dammit. That sure as hell felt like an oath. At least I’d set terms that wouldn’t fuck me—I hoped.

  Too late to change it now, I thought.

  I await you, Terael pronounced. He didn’t even try to sound patient.

  So I began with the girl’s room. I’d show him that little corner of the world inside my head, and if nothing heinous occurred, we’d go from there.

  * * *

  Taking a deep breath, I slowly released it. Closing my eyes, I started running through mnemonic exercises to bring up all the details with photographic clarity. I had clear recall of individual elements, but putting them together in a mental construct, that was going to be tricky.

  I felt worn pretty thin.

  But when did that ever stop me?

  Laying my head on the desk, I pulled all of my focus inward. As Terael had shown me, I set a perimeter and erected the walls. Once I’d started the process, I settled into it with a practiced familiarity.

  Terael had been truthful on at least one point—I’d done this before.

  The space took shape around me, each detail coming easier than the last. I added the worn carpet, the picture window with its patterned drapes, the ceiling fan that hung unused over the center of the room. Then I pictured Halley—wild hair, Disney Princess nightshirt and all. I placed the girl on the hospital bed, the Tinker Bell lamp on the table, Father Frank’s broken rocking chair in the corner. On the floor, the groaning vagrant. Billowing curtain. Broken glass. I left out Roarke and his partner.

  I put myself in the room so I could inspect all the elements. Bending to the wounded homeless man, I peeled back
the blood-caked fabric of his shirt. I called up the three Luwian characters, imagining how they looked scored into his flesh with slashes of gleaming crimson. One was kind of a double-u. The next might have been the head of a bull. Before I fully shaped the Name, I felt a hand settle on my shoulder.

  “Leave that part out.”

  Terael stood behind me.

  21

  He had golden hair and golden eyes—and even golden skin. Not shiny metallic gold, but the warm, golden brown of the tiger eye gemstone, with deeper browns as undertones. That struck me as odd, because I had seen his statue on display in the museum. It wasn’t cast from gold or even carved from a gem, but shaped from dark and worn basalt.

  It looked nothing like the slender youth standing before me.

  He moved like flesh and he breathed like flesh but everything about him shimmered with the reticulated striations of the gemstone. Tall and long-limbed like all my brethren, he was slimmer than most. His flesh and features held an adolescent softness—boyhood not yet tempered to man. His thick, shimmering hair fell softly to his shoulders, darker by a shade than his warm and glinting skin. The aureate gleam of his extravagant curls matched the color of the two broad wings that spread behind him, rustling faintly with a sound like sand scouring against marble.

  He wore not a stitch of clothing, standing naked and utterly unabashed by this fact. If he’d worn eyeliner and a little jewelry, he could have walked straight from Oscar Wilde’s private stable of rent boys. I turned my gaze away, too stunned by the whole of his appearance to be able to formulate any kind of intelligent response.

  “Even this, you do not remember,” he murmured sadly. He had a lilting tenor, reinforcing his aura of sumptuous youth. “Oh, my poor, wounded brother. How fragile is the flesh.”

  His pity chaffed at me, but the shock of seeing him like a flesh-and-blood being overruled the emotion. I’d known Terael only as a disembodied voice strangely singing in my mind. He’d kept me company through long hours at the art museum—and, frankly, sometimes he’d gotten on my nerves with his constant, semi-lucid prattle. This new form jarred my awareness. My head twitched where it rested against my desk in the seemingly distant confines of my office.

  “You’re, uh—you’re standing here,” I stammered, opting to leave out the part about him being buck-ass naked and apparently happy to be alive. I didn’t think he’d take well to a lecture on propriety. “How can you be standing here in front of me?”

  Terael’s lips curled into a consoling smile. “I am here. And in my idol, and in your office, sibling. And elsewhere. In the drifting dreams of my faithful, who guard the treasures of my temple.”

  “You do realize you’re one of the treasures they’re guarding, right?” I asked.

  “As it should be.” His smile broadened, exposing perfect, golden teeth.

  I boggled at him, rubbing the hard angle of my jaw. “I always wonder if my life can get any weirder, and then I see shit like this.”

  Terael pressed a finger lightly to my lips and laughed.

  “That you did not mean to share. You are out of practice in this art.”

  His skin felt like living flesh, yet it lay against my mouth with the cool, unyielding weight of polished quartz. I recoiled from the touch. With a languorous grace, Terael stepped back into his own bubble of personal space. I scrubbed the back of my hand across my lips. If my reaction offended him, he made no sign.

  “The walls and baffles of your mind must be firm,” he cautioned. “Discipline is required to rein in stray thoughts.”

  I swallowed hard as I met the twin jewels of his eyes. “I’ve been working pretty hard on those walls and baffles. You might just have to live with a stray thought or two. It’s always a little noisy in here.”

  “I have at least grown fond of your peculiar remarks,” he answered. His bemused expression sloughed away, leaving his face an anxious, gilded mask. “Now let us see the extent of the trouble that has come knocking at my door.”

  He bent to the figure of the fallen man I’d conjured in the mental space.

  “Terhu—” I began, but Terael cut me off sharply.

  “Do not speak that Name in a space like this, Zaquiel,” he warned. “We both risk much if you call him here, and I will not countenance such a danger.” The sharp edge of his tone spurred my defiance.

  “Is that a threat for him or me?”

  “I will threaten any who side with that one, and stand in opposition until I have no strength left,” he swore. The corona of his hair blew back in a sudden swell of power. I met the fire in his eyes without blinking. I’d won staring contests against Saliriel, and she was a decimus of the Nephilim.

  “I’m not the enemy,” I reminded him.

  In an instant, all of his threatened fury dissolved, and I was reminded that Terael always seemed a little off in the head. Although he was tied to stone, his moods ran swift as mercury.

  “Then do not speak his Name,” he insisted. “My tribe works through idols and images. A Name whispered upon the lips of the faithful is a potent idol in its way.”

  “I’m not even part of his fan club,” I objected. “I just want to know how to protect that girl.”

  On the bed, my recollected image of Halley lingered like a hologram stuck on pause. Terael nodded obliquely in her direction—at least acknowledging her—but he didn’t budge from the man at our feet.

  “I must see the extent of his fighting strength before I examine the lamb who might treble it.”

  “Lamb?” I demanded. Given my siblings’ Biblical predilections, that didn’t sound good for Halley. “You better not be talking sacrifice.”

  With dream-like languor, he trailed a finger along the vagrant’s stubbled jaw. “In days long past, blood ran sweetly on the altar. Sacrifice sustains all members of my tribe.” In his lilting tenor, the words rang like music, ugly though they were. I couldn’t tell if he meant them as explanation or excuse.

  Neither option made me happy.

  “No,” I snapped. The walls around us bowed with the force of my negation.

  Mouth flattening in a moue of reproach, Terael glared from beneath a nest of golden lashes. The depth of hunger glittering in his inhuman eyes stunned me into silence.

  “If the Thunderer sought sacrifice of the human girl, she already would be dead,” he pronounced. “You yourself said his agents came not to kill, but to steal her from her home.” Restless fingers stroked the face of the homeless man as Terael’s expression grew distant. “A greater destiny is fated for the ones we choose as lamb.”

  “And by ‘greater,’ you mean worse,” I said. “What’s worse than sacrifice, Terael?”

  He refused to respond. Unspoken on the air hung all the details he withheld, taunting at the edge of perception. My hands curled into fists, both here and in the office, as I struggled to rein in my temper.

  “I’m here for answers, Terael,” I snarled. “You better start to deliver.”

  Wherever his thoughts had strayed, it wasn’t pretty. An aching mixture of loss, regret, and anguish scudded like clouds across his youthful features. The weight of those emotions added years I couldn’t begin to count. When next he spoke, his voice seemed to resonate from two places at once—here, and the distant past.

  “This is what you missed, my brother, seen but not perceived with waking eyes.” He sounded inexpressibly weary. With a sweep of one dusty wing, he gestured over the prone man. A tapestry of smoky lines coalesced upon the air, each trailing from the minion. They rose to a point above him, like a puppet’s many strings.

  “I saw one of those,” I sputtered. “Only one. On a different man, upstairs.”

  “Some part of you observed, and knew,” he said. “And that is why we stand here now, for my delivery of answers.” He cast the words like daggers. “I can pull your hidden knowledge where it can be seen.”

  Still gobsmacked that I’d missed that much, I thrilled with the brittle beginnings of hope. Maybe I hadn’t recognized all those
tendrils when I’d seen them in the first go-round, but the perceptions were there, locked in my subconscious. This projection was proof.

  Dorimiel hadn’t crippled me permanently.

  That was huge. But if Terael had any sense of this revelation’s impact, he didn’t show it. He remained fixated on Whisper Man’s wounded lackey.

  “This one you show me is damaged, yes?” he mused. “A weakened mind. Fewer walls.”

  “Yeah.” With difficulty, I pulled myself back to the moment. “My guess is he’s homeless,” I offered. “Might be mentally ill—a whole lot of people fall through the cracks. Not enough money for treatment.” The pea coat and Army boots made me wonder now if he was a vet. No way to know for sure. “An easy target for possession.”

  “Not possession. Choosing,” he corrected. “In ancient days, we called them god-touched. Minds like this are always first to hear our call.” My gilt-skinned sibling cupped his hand against the seamed and dirty face. There was a tender, pitying intimacy to the gesture. Something in me railed against it.

  Focus, I urged myself—and was unreasonably thrilled when the thought remained private.

  Terael’s voice wove singsong rhythms on the air. “Through dreams, then waking visions, they hear our voices when they pass within our sphere,” he said. “Those our whispers reach eventually let us in. Mortals crave our guidance, and the broken ones crave it most.”

  “Halley’s not broken,” I objected. “She’s got challenges, sure. But she’s worlds away from guys like this. How’s this asshole getting to her?”

  Terael frowned at my interruption. “The weak-minded are ours to call first, but that does not preclude others,” he responded. “A god must build his flock in stages.”

  “Pretty harsh god if he asks them to carve his name in their skin,” I grumbled.

  “It is a sign of their devotion,” Terael replied. “The token ties him to their flesh, thus to achieve communion.” A jealous note of longing rang through the Rephaim’s words. I fought to suppress a shudder. “They become his hands and eyes in the mortal world. Through it, he speaks to them beyond the limits of his temple. Rides them, if he must, though mortal minds are often crushed beneath the full weight of our presence.”