“Let me see that.” I reached out and took it from her. She started to object, but I shook my head firmly, making a sweeping gesture with my free hand. “My place, remember? My prints are all over.”
“Good point,” she said, and she relinquished the frame.
Moving to the front windows where a patch of light shone from a nearby streetlamp, I squinted down at the picture in my hand. I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting, but it certainly wasn’t this. The roughly nine-by-twelve frame housed not a picture nor a photo, but the page of a book. It was very old, with a stylized drop capital, florid calligraphy, and an illuminated panel at the top. The rich pigments of the illumination took on a dark and velvety texture in the weak spill of light, accented with the unmistakable glint of gold leaf. The parchment had a rich and creamy texture, glowing with a depth you just didn’t get with ordinary paper.
“It’s from a psaltery,” I muttered. “Latin—probably thirteenth, maybe early fourteenth century. France, I think.” I looked around the room again, taking things in with a new set of eyes. There were more framed pages. “I study this stuff,” I said, and almost remembered it. I tried to catch more, but it slipped my grasp. For a moment, I considered unclenching that fist in my head and seeing what impressions I might pick up from the place, but I still didn’t have a handle on those powers. I really didn’t want to end up twitching on the floor—especially not around Lil.
So I went for a more conventional approach, digging through the untidy piles of books and reading the spines. Lil didn’t move from her relatively clear spot just inside the entrance. With her gray-eyed gaze, she watched me curiously.
“Ancient Near Eastern Languages,” I read. “A History of Sumer, Babylon, and Akkad.” I grabbed the next one. “Ugaritic Culture and Its Impact on the Abrahamic Faith.” And the next one. “Sons of Ur: the Sumerian Roots of the Book of the Watchers.” Pretty soon, I stood in the midst of a growing pile of thick, obscure tomes, only some of which were in English. “I study this!” I declared with mounting excitement.
“Well, of course you do,” Lil purred, “but you cheat. You spoke most of those languages back in the day.”
I dropped the book I was holding and goggled at her.
“Uh, Lil,” I said, “that was like, six thousand years ago.”
“So?” she asked archly. “You’re immortal. Don’t tell me you forgot that, too.” At that I flashed back to my very first memories of the night.
Struggling to keep my head above water.
Swimming, then face-down in the sand.
Coughing up lake water.
Wondering why I hadn’t drowned. What if I did?
“Six thousand years?”
The other vision came surging back. Ancient temple. Rough spun tunics. Bronze—not iron—blades. It had felt like a memory, but how long ago had it been? My head felt too full and I sat down heavily, scattering books.
“What the hell, Zack?” Lil cried.
Then she did the most humane thing I’d seen out of her since our introduction in the Flats. She sidestepped the piles of books and knelt down by me, reaching a comforting hand toward my shoulder. All I could do was flinch away.
“Don’t fucking touch me!” I cried.
She scowled, but kept her hands to herself. Perching in front of me, she easily balanced on the balls of her feet.
“All right, then,” she said, “but you need to get a grip.”
I pressed the palms of my hands against my eyes, trying to breathe through the panic.
“Just don’t talk about the weird shit right now, OK?” I muttered. “This is a lot to take in.”
“Fine.” She smirked. “I won’t even tell you you’re being a pussy. How’s that?” she added with a sarcastic grin.
I glared at her and actually took a swing in her direction. I didn’t intend to hit her too hard—just cuff her on the shoulder for being such a snot. She saw it coming and nimbly danced away, laughing in her maddeningly sexy way. I tried to scramble after her, but between the books and my size thirteen boots I got all tangled up on myself. Tumbling onto the nearest upended bookcase, I smacked my elbow and very nearly whacked my chin.
After such an impressive display, I felt my ego swell. Though maybe it was my elbow. I lay nose to nose with a Starbuck action figure flung atop one of the framed pieces of manuscript. Lamely, I tried to recall why Starbuck was a woman with a bitching blonde bob—when my eyes focused on the framed piece beneath the figure.
It was caught under a half-toppled bookcase. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at, but every fiber of my being clamored that it was important.
“I got it,” I said, reaching for the frame.
“You got it all right.” Lil laughed, wiping tears from her eyes. “Showed that bookcase who’s boss.”
“No,” I snarled as I pulled the picture frame free. “I found something they missed.”
Lil was standing over me as quick as that. She peered down at the framed vellum page in my hands.
“All right. What is it?”
The answer poured from my lips before I could think about it. “This is an illustration from the Celestial Hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. Venice. Fifteenth century.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” she said a little skeptically.
I gestured with mounting excitement as my knowledge of the piece came flooding back. “See these three circles, twined together? They represent the three tiers of heavenly hierarchies—and the three circles inside each of them are the three choirs, or orders, assigned to each tier.”
Holy crap, I thought. I’d actually remembered something.
“It’s pretty much just circles and funky letters, Zack. Compared to some of the others, with the gold and all, this piece is kind of dull.”
“That’s not the point,” I grumbled. “I think I picked this one because it’s not flashy. It’s just black ink. Easy enough to reproduce something that doesn’t stick out.”
She leaned closer, squinting at the illustration, and made an irritated little noise in the back of her throat. “You’re going to have to spell it out for me. All that Latin and angel stuff is your gig, not mine.”
“The ring of numbers just inside each of those big circles,” I said, tapping the glass. “Those aren’t supposed to be there. None of those numbers are. It’s a code.”
She frowned, shook her head and wandered over to the front window, looking up and down the street.
“Great,” she said without bothering to turn back. “So what does it say?”
I looked back down at the carefully inserted rings of numbers. The surge of elation crashed suddenly back to reality.
“I have no fucking clue.”
She smacked her forehead with a groan.
“Mother’s tears,” she said.
“I’ll figure it out,” I insisted.
“Sure—once it’s no longer useful.” She waved with an impatient gesture. “Make it portable. I don’t think we should stay here much longer. Morning traffic’s starting up, and if there’s a police bulletin out for you, we can’t count on this place staying off the radar forever.”
I began removing the vellum sheet from its gilded frame. As I got the glass and matting off, a small white envelope fell out from behind the cardboard. I wasn’t sure why, but I glanced over to see whether or not Lil noticed. She was leaning on the sill, a crease of worry marring her brow as she tracked some car or another on its journey down the street. I snatched up the unmarked envelope and stowed it in the interior pocket of my jacket. With the extra socks from Wal-Mart, it was getting kind of crowded in there.
“Hey, Lil,” I said, rolling the antique vellum and looking around for a poster tube or something. I settled on the empty tube from a roll of paper towels. The edges poked out, but it was better than nothing. “At least let me grab some clean clothes.”
“Sure,” she said distractedly, “but make it quick.”
I headed for a short hallway leading
away from the living room. The bathroom door was partly open, and I was reminded of yet another thing I hadn’t done all day, in addition to sleep and eating. An extra minute or two wasn’t going to kill me—assuming anything could kill me. I cast the thought from my head almost as soon as it manifested.
Basic needs now, weird shit later.
I flicked the light on, did my business, then paused in front of the mirror to wash my hands. It was the first time I’d really had a chance to look at myself, and Lil was right. I looked terrible. Abrasions scabbed my jaw underneath at least a day’s worth of stubble. A little cut crusted above one eyebrow. The bruises didn’t hurt as much as I thought they should. Maybe there were upsides to being immortal.
As I tried to comb my tangled hair into some uniform direction, I caught sight of half a dozen grays scattered among the brown. Briefly, I wondered if immortals were supposed to get gray. If it was about not aging, then I wasn’t doing a very good job. Not that I looked bad or anything, but there were laugh lines around my eyes and a kind of starkness to my jaw that I took for another sign of wear and tear.
Gazing into the pale blue eyes that peered out of the mirror at me, I could see the resemblance to Remy, if not Saliriel. With that thought in mind, I checked my teeth, still feeling peculiarly paranoid. They were neither perfectly straight nor perfectly white. As I grimaced at myself, I even spied a couple of fillings back in the molars. As far as I could tell, I looked like your average, thirty-something guy.
“Zack?” Lil called back from the front room. There was an edge of impatience to her voice that reminded me of my mother. Which was a curious thought. Did winged immortals even have mothers?
“Hang on!” I called back, grabbing a little brown leather travel case from the back of the toilet. I snatched up a razor, comb, and toothbrush. There were two in the cup. One was purple, one was blue. I took the blue one, instinctively knowing it was mine—which left me wondering about the other one. Still pondering it, I flipped off the light and slipped back to the apartment’s single bedroom.
Whoever had turned the place upside down hadn’t spared anything here. Even the mattress was slashed. I dropped the leather jacket onto the disaster of a bed and shucked out of the clothes I’d worn for who knew how long. Sand cascaded everywhere when I pulled the T-shirt off, and I tried not to think about how badly I wanted a shower.
Donning a fresh T-shirt and jeans, I managed only to feel slightly cleaner. Riffling through upended drawers, I snagged a couple changes of clothes. Across the dresser lay a T-shirt emblazoned with a memo from Grand Moff Tarkin, reminding all storm troopers to report for mandatory target practice at 0600 hours. Rushed as I was, it still brought a grin. I packed it.
Every article of clothing I owned seemed like it was black or some other dark shade, with the lone exception of a heather-gray hooded sweatshirt. It had a college logo emblazoned across the front.
CASE WESTERN
RESERVE UNIVERSITY
When I picked up the sweatshirt, something tumbled to the floor—a little black-lace bra. That certainly didn’t belong to me. Seized with an overwhelming impulse, I rushed to the dresser, searching among the shattered bits of broken mirror. Receipts, business cards, other junk—then I found what I was looking for. A little strip of images, done up like they’d been taken in one of those old-fashioned photo booths, but it was laser-printer slick—a modern photo. Torn at the bottom, half the images were gone. The first two remained with gut-wrenching clarity.
Against a generic background, my face smiled out at me, wearing a goofy expression I probably thought was funny at the time. Beside me, looking only slightly more serious, was the black-haired woman who’d haunted me in visions. Her skin and features placed her heritage somewhere in the Middle East. She carried the warmth and exoticism of those lands in her knowing smile and arresting gaze.
Lailah.
The bra, the toothbrush, and now this.
I dropped onto the edge of the ruined bed trying to remember how to breathe.
“Dammit, Zack, we don’t have all night!” Lil cried, storming down the hall to retrieve me. She stopped in the doorway when she saw the stricken look on my face.
I wetted too-dry lips.
“You didn’t tell me…” I began. “You didn’t say I was involved with her.”
Lil’s gaze flicked from the lacey undergarment to the torn photo held loosely in my hand.
“She never said you were.”
Lil had carried a book back with her—the one with the torn pages. She tossed it next to me onto the bed. “Pack that. It’s the only one they damaged. I want to know why. The damned thing’s in French.” I didn’t even look at it. Wordlessly, I shoved it in with the rolled-up T-shirts and jeans.
Lil lingered awkwardly in the door. “With Lailah—does it make a difference if you can’t remember?” she asked.
My throat suddenly felt too tight. I swept off of the bed and finished stuffing clothes into the backpack. There was a pair of engineer boots in the corner of the wrecked closet, and I traded up from the cheap shit kickers I’d bought at Wal-Mart. Finally I trusted myself to speak again.
“Yeah. It makes a fucking difference.”
I grabbed my jacket and turned to go, nearly crushing the cordless phone underfoot. It had fallen from the nightstand and lay half under the bed. It looked like something transported from the wrong decade, a digital answering machine built into its base. I froze when a tinny voice announced a date and time stamp. They hadn’t erased the messages.
“Tuesday, twelve fifty-two A.M.”
My voice, breathless. “They’re safe. I’m on the run, though. One of those bastards chased me all the way through Rockefeller Park. Some kid saw the shoot-out. Get ahold of Bobby before that turns into a real clusterfuck.”
Traffic sounds in the distance and a loud click as I hung up. That explained the police bulletin. I wondered who Bobby was. The answering machine didn’t give me time to ponder for long.
“Tuesday, two-forty-six A.M.”
“Lailah. If you’re there, pick up. Don’t go back tonight. The Nephilim have anchors all over. They’re watching the place.”
I didn’t have a fucking clue what an anchor was, but my voice made it sound urgent. The computerized records-keeper made her inexorable advance to the next message.
“Tuesday, three-thirty-five A.M.”
My voice again, desperate. “Lailah? Lailah, pick up! Your cell’s going straight to voicemail.” There was a pause and the wind gusted over the mic. “Lailah? Fuck!”
I’d practically been yelling into the phone. The answering machine continued to play.
“Thursday, four-twenty-five A.M.”
A male voice, flat and uninflected said, “Lake View, nine A.M. The angel. You know the one.”
Something about the voice or what it reminded me of made all the hairs stand up on my arms. I had no conscious recognition, however. The guy sounded almost as robotic as the automated voice reciting the time and date stamp. The only thing that stood out was a curious twang to his a’s.
His message was the last.
A suffocating silence fell over the room. Lil asked, “Do you know who that was?”
“Nope,” I replied. My pulse thundered. I didn’t want to subject myself to the messages again, especially not the ones where I was calling for Lailah. Still, I steeled myself and hit play. I listened carefully for anything that might offer more information. I could hear cars in the background in each of mine. So I’d been on the move, probably on a cell. In the final message, background noise was conspicuously empty. Not even an echo, like the speaker stood in some soundproofed room.
“You think he’s talking about Lake View Cemetery?” Lil asked.
I shrugged. “I guess.”
“At least we have a timeline,” she observed. “Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
I nodded, the voice of the stranger still rattling uneasily in my head. Before I left, I yanked the wire from the phone and
erased everything.
19
We fled to a diner near Ford and Mayfield called Egg Hedz. I wasn’t keen on being someplace so public, but Lil insisted it was safer with people around us, and we needed somewhere to sit and go over what we’d found. She ignored my concerns about the police bulletin, insisting people would only take notice if I acted like I had something to hide. Easy for her to say—she wasn’t the one who’d been spotted in a shoot-out only a few blocks away.
The little greasy spoon was busier than expected, probably because it was so close to University Circle, but we managed to score a booth tucked far away in the back. Despite my clamoring nerves, no one looked twice at us. All the customers seemed to be students from Case Western too intent on scarfing down some breakfast to bother paying attention to anything beyond their smartphones. Few of them bothered looking up from the devices, rapidly tapping out texts or scrolling through their social media and newsfeeds.
“So what do we have?” Lil asked.
I shoveled the last of my “Barn Buster” omelet into my mouth and hastily chewed. “A whole lot of nothing if I can’t decode that cipher,” I admitted.
Lil scowled into her coffee. “Assuming it’s relevant to any of this.”
“No,” I objected, gesturing with the fork. “It’s important. I know that much. I just can’t tell you how.”
“Then you’d better get cracking. What about that meeting at Lake View?”
I shrugged. “No clue. Not even sure I got that message before I ended up in the lake.” Neither of us brought up the issue of the shooting, though it nagged in the back of my thoughts. Who was Bobby and what had I been doing to get chased? Had a shoot-out been my only option?
Lil made a frustrated noise, bringing my thoughts back to the present. “Give me something, Anakim. I’m tired of chasing shadows.”
“Let me grab some paper,” I grumbled. Casting a quick glance around the diner to be sure no one was looking, I reached over to the empty booth across from us and snagged a clean place mat and roll of silverware. Focusing on clearing the space in front of me, I unrolled the silverware, using the spare napkin to wipe off any crumbs and grease that had collected on the table. Then I dug the roll with the manuscript page out of the backpack, holding my hand out to Lil.
Conspiracy of Angels Page 9
