Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  On this side, sounds were muffled when they could be heard at all. As with colors, the entropic atmosphere ground them swiftly away. That I could hear her at all suggested that she was more than an imprint.

  This daughter might just be a ghost.

  “Hello?” I said. “Leah? Alana?” She sounded too old to be Kaylee.

  The cries came again, repeating the exact same words.

  Darkness swirled beyond the threshold, cloying and thick. I pressed against it, only to discover that the echo to that level had no stairs. In their place were jagged timbers, jutting from the pit like broken teeth. I caught myself before I pitched forward, reflexively spreading my wings. Bracing them against the walls, I leaned over the edge.

  “Hey! I can hear you,” I called. My voice rang flat against the darkness.

  “Daddy, no! Daddy, why?” The words were identical in pitch and timbre, drenched with emotion, but lacking awareness. An imprint after all. I considered flying down into the darkened cellar, just to be sure, but then something brushed past me on its way up. A memory of motion. Shadow-and-Flame.

  But this imprint wasn’t connected with any kind of trauma. All I felt was a trace of his power, and a profound, simmering rage. I wondered if I left such an obvious trail, carving echoes of light and blue fire in the wake of my wings.

  In the shadowed depths of the cellar, the imprint of a slaughtered girl repeated her plaintive question.

  “Daddy, why?”

  If I wanted answers, I wouldn’t find them with her.

  I stepped back from the chasm and followed Shadow-and-Flame.

  37

  I lost him for a bit, but caught a hint again at the end of the hall. Stairs led up to the next level, and these had solid substance. I followed in the swirls of soot and embers trailing from his wings. Up the stairs, down the hall, into a room on the left. I wondered why his passage was so obvious—then it dawned on me.

  He wasn’t cowled—wasn’t even trying to mask his presence. Had he been inviting discovery?

  The dark tendrils of another psychic stain drew my attention to the room. My unnamed sibling’s presence flickered in my vision, overwhelmed by the echo of yet another death. This one had been swift, but misery etched the walls. She had lain here, weeping, disconsolate. The impression of despair outweighed even the imprint of her passing.

  He had killed her in her bed. His motions suggested a blade—though it was nothing compared to the bastard sword of blackened fire he’d wielded in the foyer. Judging by the girl’s size, this was the middle daughter. She lay listless as he approached.

  She didn’t even fight.

  I backed out of the room as the ripples of her snuffed life washed over me like a bubble popping. The girl seemed strangely relieved to die. That bittersweet emotion drove daggers into my gut. What had been done to her that death provided such sweet escape?

  “I fucking hate this,” I murmured to myself, but I had one more to find—Kaylee, the youngest daughter, whose blood had painted the walls.

  This would be the worst.

  My sibling, riding upon the back of a Marine, swept past me. His steps tracked a memory of fury and doom into the fabric of the house. He halted near the end of the hall, raised one booted foot and, from the looks of it, kicked down a door.

  Slipping after him, I tried to steel myself for what I would find, but it was more than the stifling atmosphere that made my breath catch in my throat. All the bright emotions that danced upon the walls in the littlest girl’s room had run to black and gray. The haunting echo of a child’s pure laugh lingered just beneath the memory of her cries, fractured like an artifact in a recording that had been saved over too many times.

  Shadow-and-Flame dragged her from the room, painting the halls with her terror. His actions were slow and deliberate, and there was no mistaking his goal. Pure torture. I wanted to look away, but that grinning face from the photo deserved someone who could bear witness and understand.

  She struggled in his arms, mouth gaping wide in a pleading wail. The Shadowside mercifully swallowed all remnants of the sound. He only gripped her tighter.

  I followed the echo of atrocity down the hall to another set of stairs. A turn at the landing, and then a room familiar from Bobby’s crime scene photos. The trendy color of the paint on the walls didn’t translate. I only saw the red.

  My sibling scrawled his message in the little girl’s screams. Threads of power wove through the letters scribed upon the wall with the angry glow of molten lava. Magic pulsed in the glyphs, fueled by little Kaylee’s death. I still couldn’t read the Luwian, apart from Terhuziel’s Name, but meaning nevertheless teased at the edges of consciousness. Dreading the contact, but curious to learn more, I stepped through the blackened pool of tears and horror left behind by Kaylee’s gruesome execution.

  I pressed my hand to the wall.

  The murderer’s voice boomed in my head, carried on the power he’d poured through his words.

  I have slaughtered your woman. I have slaughtered your food. I will come for you and cast you back into the prison you have earned with your crimes.

  Face me, coward.

  The words were a tripwire, and their meaning shrapneled into my brain. Something else triggered when I touched them, but I couldn’t parse the spell. It blew past with such strength, it thrust me forcibly back into the flesh-and-blood world. I landed with an inarticulate cry, dropping to my hands and knees as my legs crumpled. I gulped air, and everything tasted like ash.

  Those bloodstained letters blistered in my mind, eclipsing all else.

  Blinking in the wake of that red haze, I found myself staring at pointy-toed boots, covered ridiculously in white plastic bags sporting a Wal-Mart logo. The stench of soot and brimstone was chased from my nostrils by an aggressively orange scent rising from the carpet beneath those boots.

  I rocked back on my haunches, gaping at Lil.

  “Found a sliding glass door on the patio,” she chirped, tucking something that might have been a nail file back into her purse. “Couldn’t resist.” She canted her head as she looked down at me. “You OK, flyboy?”

  “Need a minute,” I choked.

  “You know, you’ll negate that whole ‘leave no evidence’ thing if you toss your cookies on the rug.”

  “Fuck you, Lil,” I spat. Shakily, I stood. She held out a hand, but I didn’t take it.

  “How about we get to work?” she suggested, letting the hand fall back to her side.

  I glowered at her. “I am working.”

  “Oh, yeah? So what you got?”

  “Terhuziel wasn’t the only one of the brethren in this house.”

  “Really?” she asked. Lil’s eyes gleamed with a cold gray light in the thickness of the shadows. She leaned closer, all her muscles going taut as if preparing to pounce.

  “Flame and shadow, tattered wings,” I murmured, calling his image to memory. It wasn’t hard. I was probably going to see him in my nightmares, hunched over the little girl.

  “Really big sword?” Lil asked.

  “Yeah,” I responded. “How’d you know?”

  The weak light spilling through a distant window painted her features in stark angles and planes. “Gibburim,” she spat. The word sizzled on the air.

  “Not a fan,” I ventured. “Are there any of our tribes you don’t hate?”

  “The Malakim aren’t so bad,” she allowed. “The rest of you—assholes and boneheads in equal measure. But a Gibburim hunting Tarhunda might work to our advantage. Save us a whole lot of effort, at any rate.”

  “Terhuziel,” I corrected automatically.

  Lil rolled her eyes, refusing comment.

  “That hunting part might be a problem,” I said, gesturing to the wall behind me. “He left a message, taunting the Rephaim, but I’m not sure he expected to get an answer so soon. Ter-hoo-ha handed him his ass just inside the front door.”

  Lil peered past me, squinting at the wall.

  “What message?” she
asked.

  I turned to follow her gaze, wondering how in the hell she could miss it—only to discover that on this side, the wall had been cleaned. Come to think of it, everything had been cleaned. That was the source of the nasty orange scent hanging on the air. Industrial disinfectant.

  “Fuck me running,” I grumbled.

  Lil piqued a brow. “I always wonder where you picked that phrase up, and then I realize—it’s probably some obscure movie I don’t give a shit about.”

  Ignoring her, I scanned the darkened interior as best I could, since my eyes tipped more toward mortal. We stood in what might have been a study, with a desk and a few bookshelves arranged along the walls. All the furniture was sleek and heavy and looked to be hand carved from exotic wood. Everything was clean and neat as a realtor’s model home.

  I’d encountered nothing but death on the Shadowside—no tethers, no images of a hideout. No clues as to Terhuziel’s whereabouts.

  The now-blank wall jigged to the left, leading to a little alcove. From what I could recall, that was where Kramer had kept his displays of smuggled antiquities. Maybe that still held something. I stepped around the corner, only to find that the shelves had been cleared of every single item.

  Collected as evidence. Hell—the things were probably going to end up on my desk at the art museum. Way too late for them to be of any use to me, though.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck,” I spat with exceptional feeling.

  Lil regarded me. “We going to search this place or just stand around all night?”

  “Half of what I need is probably in an evidence locker,” I growled.

  “Mother’s Tears, why didn’t you think of that before?” she said through gritted teeth. Then, a little less caustically, she said, “Fine. We’ll work with it. The police never get everything anyhow. I’ll start by going through the desk. You take this.”

  She drew a small, gray item from her purse. Vaguely mouse-shaped, it was wide at the bottom and had an intimation of ears near the tip. It dangled from the end of a key chain. I stared at it in confusion.

  “What’s that?”

  She cupped a hand around the tip of the item, pressing one of two buttons atop what should have been its head. A weak beam of light cut through the shadows. “I decided to take pity on you,” she explained.

  “You had this the whole time?” I said. “Back in the parking garage?”

  She rolled a shoulder. “Hold it low and point it toward the floor.” She moved her own hand close to her body in demonstration. “And avoid the fucking windows.”

  Immediately, I pressed the wrong button. A little red dot shone on the floor.

  “I knew it,” I said. “This is a cat toy.” I laughed tightly. “Why the hell are you carrying a cat toy around in your Purse of Many Things? Don’t tell me Lulu the Lioness likes playing with it.”

  Lil just marched over to the desk. “What the hell am I looking for, Anakim?”

  I aimed the laser pointer toward her feet, still chuckling over the image of her massive spirit-lion chasing the little red dot. Lil shot me a look so scathing, it should have scoured away a full layer of skin. I stopped fucking around.

  “Secondary properties,” I said. “Any kind of paperwork indicating places where the doc might run, now that he can’t return here. If the storm’s an accurate marker, he’s close to University Hospital—within a mile or so.”

  “That’s not much to go on,” she grumbled.

  “Halley picked up Terhuziel either at the Cleveland Clinic or at her grandfather’s funeral. I’m betting the funeral. Worse comes to worst, I should be able to sense the edge of his domain, as long as I’m right up on it. I just don’t want to have to search a square mile of University Circle on foot,” I sighed, and ran my knuckles wearily across my jaw.

  Leaving Lil to search the study, I headed deeper into the house. The temptation to find the kitchen—and a coffee maker—ran high, but I kept my head down, focused on the weak pool of light aimed at my feet.

  The next room off the study was a recreation room with a huge fifty-two-inch flat-screen mounted to one wall. Floating shelves held a few exotic-looking trinkets, but on closer inspection, most of them were standard décor—the kind of stuff cranked out in Indonesian sweatshops.

  I strode carefully through the rec room to what could only be classed as a man-cave, then down a hallway that opened on one side in a double-wide archway leading to an elaborate dining room emptied of table and chairs. Blood darkened the polished teak of the floor—even the cleaning crew hadn’t cleared all the stains. The plastic bags tied round my boots crinkled with every step.

  That sound must have covered his movement, because I had no sense that anyone was behind me until I felt the cold barrel of a pistol pressed against the base of my skull.

  I froze.

  Basso laughter dragged prickling shards along my spine.

  “I could have killed you ten times over,” he boasted, his tone chillingly flat. “You have gotten soft, Zaquiel.”

  38

  “Garrett?” I even managed to sound flippant about it, as opposed to pants-shitting scared. I didn’t turn around to confirm my suspicion—the cold stamp of that barrel was a great deterrent against any kind of sudden motion.

  “You do not need to keep up your ignorant act,” he answered. “You can acknowledge your old ally by Name.”

  Old ally. I closed my eyes, exhaling very slowly as my mind raced around its many vexing holes. What kind of ally would hold a gun to my head? I fucking hated my brothers. At least I knew I was right about Shadow-and-Flame.

  “Didn’t want to discuss business in front of your partner,” I lied. I curled my fist around Lil’s flashlight, calculating just how quickly I could dive through to the Shadowside.

  Not quick enough to avoid a bullet.

  “He is annoying,” Garrett acknowledged in his curiously flat tone. “And persistent. I did not realize that you were acquainted.”

  “You know me,” I said, laughing tightly. “Always making friends.”

  Behind me, Garrett snorted. He didn’t remove the gun.

  “You been following me all night or just since I got here?” I asked.

  “I do not wish to repeat what happened in Damascus,” he said flatly. “I announced my business with the seal. You could have showed sense and backed off.” He ground the barrel a little deeper. “The decimus is my responsibility. You will leave him to me.”

  “I don’t feel particularly cooperative when someone holds a gun to my head,” I snapped. “Besides—it’s not like a bullet will get rid of me.”

  “Long enough for me to hunt down my quarry,” Garrett scoffed. “I will have twenty years, perhaps thirty, to prepare myself for when you retaliate.”

  “Sounds like you got it all figured out,” I said.

  “I learned from our last disagreement,” he growled.

  So much for bluffing.

  Every muscle screamed for me to whirl around, grab the gun, and smash it into his face repeatedly while I shouted the names of each of the girls who had died in this house—starting with little Kaylee. There was something soul-killing in knowing how he had robbed the world of the youngest girl’s smile. Her gutting terror still echoed, only one room away.

  My power ratcheted up for that inhuman burst of speed, but I couldn’t risk it. He might match me and pull the trigger. I ground my teeth in futile rage.

  “Well, I guess you have no honor, then,” I said, uncertain why I chose that particular word. From the subtle shift of the gun, I must have hit a nerve. I ran with it. “If you’re going to shoot me in the back of the head like some honorless cur, get on with it.” “Cur” was probably pushing it. I held my breath. Shockingly, Garrett eased up on the pistol.

  “I could lecture you on honor,” he spat. “You, who abandoned our crusade—all for the sake of a woman. Do the cries of her pleasure salve your conscience at night?”

  I gaped, and he probably took it for shock. Was he talking about Lai
lah? I wanted to pin him to the wall and demand explanations, but I couldn’t risk playing my hand. For the moment, he didn’t know about my amnesia.

  “I don’t tolerate people gossiping about my sisters like that.”

  Lil stood at the end of the hallway, one shoulder casually braced against the wall. Lightning threatened in the gray wells of her eyes. I wondered how long she’d been standing there, waiting for him to take the gun away.

  Giving in to the urge to move, I put some distance between me and Garrett—and whoever was riding around in his head. I ended with my back against a wall. If I was going to take a bullet, at least I’d see the muzzle-flash.

  “I have no desire to trade words with you, hellcat,” he said.

  “Gibburim,” she spat. “Which one are you? You all look alike.” Garrett—or the Gibburim, rather—ignored her entirely, turning to me.

  “You stink of Nephilim, and consort with the Daughters of Lilith.” He pointed the pistol toward the floor, lifting his finger from the trigger. “I do not even know you.”

  That makes two of us, I thought. With my out-loud voice, I asked, “Nephilim have a stink?” Pointedly, I sniffed the arm of my leather jacket. “I guess you’re right, Lil. Remy really needs to do something about that cologne.”

  She choked on a laugh. “That mouth is going to get you shot, Zaquiel.” The steely glint of her fury returned the instant she lasered her attention back to Garrett. “There’s two of us and one of you. Why don’t you find somewhere else to be?”

  Shadows boiled in the air around him, shot through with gleaming flashes of red that would have been at home in the cracks of Mount Doom. He spoke with a voice ghosted through with a second, deeper tone.

  “You are interfering with my hunt.”

  A form appeared, riding on his back, complete with two sets of eyes shot through with angry flames. All four eyes were riveted on me. I focused on a point to the left of his flesh-and-blood mouth. That was safer for my sanity.

  “What are you even doing here?” I asked.

  The edges of that wide, flat mouth dragged down. “That is a question I will ask of you. You are the one who tripped my wards to this place, and you ruined hours of work, defacing the message meant for Terhuziel.”