Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  Words erupted from everywhere and nowhere, resonating with a crushing intensity.

  Do you miss the music as much as I do, brother? I have not heard it since we came.

  Instinctively, I clapped my hands over my ears to block out the eerie and atonal sound, even as the voice came again, beamed directly into my brain.

  Have you brought our brothers back? Have you learned to set them free?

  It wouldn’t have been so bad if the thoughts didn’t feel as if they were coming from inside of me. It wasn’t just words, either. Everything was layered with sense and feel and meaning, in an overwhelmingly nuanced way. All of it felt somehow twisted and bleak. Alien emotions flooded my mind with every contact, as profound as they were painful—desolation, solitude, and a brittle, attenuated longing.

  If thoughts were a sea, these could drown me.

  “Terael?” I croaked. I spoke out loud, if only to establish a boundary between my voice and the thing resonating in my head. “I’m looking for a woman named Lailah.” Then I added, “Dr. Lailah Ganjavi.”

  Ignoring my question, the voice continued.

  Kessiel came to ask forgiveness, for the slight he paid to me. Three doves he slaughtered in the offering-place, to pay for the loss of my servants. Three doves, two guardians. The numbers calculate favorably.

  “Terael, can you hear me?”

  Of course I hear you, Zaquiel. You stand in my domain. Although I am diminished in this time and place, I still can hear and see.

  I was beginning to understand why Lil refused to come into the museum. The Rephaim’s thoughts thundered in my mind in a jarring and unnatural way. Terael’s presence lent an added pressure to the space, and I felt it wearing me down quickly. I wasn’t sure how much longer I could—or should—remain in the Shadowside.

  Yet I still needed some idea of where to go—and a way to get there without bringing the entire Cleveland police force down on my head.

  “Terael, I need your help,” I said. Even speaking was an effort. “There was a break-in the other day—”

  Kessiel I forgive, for he has paid in blood. All who come to worship now give only coin. I long for life spilled sweetly on the altars.

  That was the second time he’d mentioned Kessiel. The pervasive feel of Terael’s thought-speak made it hard to concentrate, so it took me a moment to parse the implications.

  “Terael,” I asked urgently. “Is Kessiel… is he here now?”

  He has been granted access to the guarded inner sanctums. The bells and red eyes slumber, as the space obeys my will.

  It was beginning to make sense, the way this strange sibling perceived the world. Maybe it was how his mind surged against my own. Images and concepts came clinging with each word. The museum was his temple, its guards and curators his servants. He assumed the daily visitors came to offer worship—and perhaps some of them did, after a fashion.

  A deeper knowledge of this sibling carried on the tide of his thoughts. The Rephaim were tied to idols, like the Nephilim were tied to blood. Somewhere within the museum there was a statue that served to house my sibling’s soul—and somehow, from that statue, his influence spread throughout the building.

  “Bells, red eyes,” I muttered, struggling to comprehend. “Terael, have you shut down the alarms? Is that what you mean?”

  As I have done for you often, on the nights when secret things must move within my sanctum.

  I didn’t have time to ponder the implications of that. Instead, I dropped my hold on whatever allowed me to shadow-walk through the spirit realm, and took a step back into ordinary space.

  Sight, sound, color and sensation all slammed into me with the force of air suddenly filling a vacuum. The whisper of the ventilation. The electric buzz of computers banked behind the greeting station. Red light spilling from the exit signs, dim under any other circumstance but almost blinding now in contrast to the non-light from whence I’d come.

  There was a smell, too—sharp, coppery and wet.

  Not three feet away stood a donation box crafted of Lucite and brushed metal. A pattern of gleaming droplets beaded in an arc across its front. On the tiles of the floor, a crimson splash of blood shone stark against the white of the marble.

  Piled untidily in the middle were three crumpled little bodies, chests gaping redly, the gray pinions of their wings clotted in the blood. Three doves sacrificed at the foot of the donation box.

  “Now that’s old school,” I muttered, stepping carefully around the mess. The newspapers were going to have a field day when they heard about it in the morning.

  “Terael, where is Kessiel?” I said to the air.

  He stands in that domain I have carved for you as a sign of our mutual respect, beyond the halls of service, in the cells of study and repair.

  Heard from the flesh-and-blood side of reality, Terael’s voice-thoughts weren’t quite as paralyzing, but they were still damned creepy.

  “Let me guess,” I said with a grimace. “He’s taking my things.”

  I have forbidden him to touch the statuary or the stones. Nothing precious may he have. He has not earned that right.

  “What’s he doing right now?” I asked. “Can you tell me?”

  A box of lights he seeks, and paper things once stored away. His thrumming mind brushed mine, wavering. Have I erred, my brother?

  “Damn, damn, damn!” I breathed. With the desperate hope that I’d miss any guards who might be doing their rounds, I hurried down a nearby flight of stairs. If my instincts ran true, there would be a stretch of classrooms and lecture halls, and if I hung a left from that, I’d be moving in the direction of back offices and conservator labs.

  But my memories were out of date. I ended up at a bank of doors leading to a parking garage. Rubbing my temples, I wracked the fried mess of meat and synapses that was my brain.

  “Terael,” I called, looking up as if he somehow hovered above me. I knew he didn’t, but I had to look somewhere. “I don’t know my way around. Where should I go?”

  Have you taken new flesh so soon, that your memory has fled? It seems only days since you were here, a grown man and whole.

  “Look, it’s hard to explain,” I said, trying not to let the “whole” bit get to me. “I just don’t remember, OK? Can you tell me left or right?”

  In answer, my mind flooded—not with words, but with images almost too quick to absorb. It wasn’t directions so much as a download of place-knowledge burned directly into my brain. Reeling a little, I turned and started walking. Different portions of the halls looked suddenly familiar, and I followed the spatial awareness Terael had gifted to me.

  You are wounded, brother, Terael observed as I strode quickly through the darkened halls. The voice was gentler this time, less numbingly omnipresent.

  “Yeah,” I said. It kind of hurt to admit.

  What war between the tribes erupts beyond my walls, that Nefer-Ka has marked you so?

  That stopped me cold.

  I stood there, shivering as adrenaline banged around my nervous system with nowhere useful yet to go. When I managed to speak, the tremor made it to my voice.

  “What did you say?”

  Terael took me literally and repeated his previous statement, word-for-word—or thought-for-thought, as the case may be. I reminded myself that he was a nonhuman intelligence, stuck inside a statue for more years than I probably cared to consider. He couldn’t possibly be expected to think in a normal way, so I rephrased the question, choosing my words carefully.

  “What do you mean when you say I bear the mark of Nefer-Ka?”

  The holes you bear above your heart, my brother. If not Nefer-Ka, then one of his chosen. Yet the Eye of Nefer-Ka must be buried and lost to the sands. He stood on the mountain and swore the oath, as did all the firsts of our tribes. Such things are binding.

  “His eye?” I asked with sudden urgency. “Nefer-Ka is the Nephilim primus, right? What do you know about ‘Neferkariel’s Eye’?”

  In days long passed
, each Primus shaped an icon, his power thus to share with those who were his heralds.

  Icons again. Buried symbols of power, Remy had said. And here I’d dismissed that stuff in my patchwork PDF.

  Terael paused and I felt a quavering touch, like fingers made of smoke trailing against my skin. A heartbeat later, the Rephaim recoiled within my mind, nearly blinding me with a burst of animal terror.

  Scenes of death and warfare cascaded through my mind in a stupefying jumble before he sufficiently recovered to frame comprehensible words. Though he had no lungs, he sounded breathless.

  You bear the Stylus. Two Icons unearthed. The wars have come to us again.

  Stylus? My thoughts flashed unbidden to my own memories of war—visions of the temple, that thin bone tool etching lines of pain across Dorimiel’s brow. Writing his sentence.

  A pen.

  A pen lay buried in the lining of my coat. I’d felt it when I’d retrieved the envelope. With nerveless fingers, I dug through the hole in the pocket. When I connected with the hard length tucked against the seam, Terael’s terror of the object spasmed in my mind.

  I withdrew a carved and yellowed length of bone not much longer than a No. 2 pencil. One end was shaped into a wedge. The other tapered down to a wicked point. Scrimshaw symbols spiraled along its length, elegant and fearsome as striking cobras.

  The Stylus of Anak. Please, brother, please, do not take it up. We have left the wars behind us, traded blood for simpler ways.

  “Anak,” I breathed. My tongue moved thickly in a mouth stone-dry with shock. “You mean Anakesiel, don’t you? This is the icon of the Anakim primus.”

  The Holocaust of the Idols, all the burning shapes and shadows in the wretched Hinome valley—so many Names bound and shattered. My brother, please, do not take us there again. Terael was genuinely panicked, words, emotions, and images spilling in such a riptide through my head that I had to cling to my own thoughts, or else get swept away.

  “I’m not going to use it,” I cried. “I don’t even know why I have it.”

  But if I had it—it was a good bet Dorimiel had the Eye. That was what the cipher had been telling me.

  “The Eye of Nefer-Ka,” I said. My heart thrashed desperately against my ribs. “Tell me, Terael. What does it do?”

  It took him several moments to settle down.

  As the Stylus breaks and binds, the Eye swallows memory and power. It drinks it with a touch. All the skills of Nefer-Ka are gifted to those who pay the blood.

  Understanding blossomed as he brushed minds with me. I struggled to frame a response, but Terael’s panic surged again.

  They swore, they swore! It rang like a clarion in my head.

  “I need to be very clear on this,” I said. I touched the hollow ache above my heart. “You’re telling me that someone can use the Nephilim icon to take memories away.”

  Not merely take, but to devour, so the knowledge feeds the one who eats it.

  White-hot fury blazed within me, till all my thoughts were fire. I had stood in Sal’s throne room, practically spelling out an attack with the Nephilim icon, while she and Remy pretended it was nothing.

  Lil was right—and Remy was as bad as Saliriel. They were all involved. How the hell else could two of the fucking icons of the primae be rattling around right under their noses?

  I was being played.

  “Is Kessiel one of the Nephilim?” I growled. I already knew the answer.

  In a tiny voice—or what served him as a voice—Terael answered.

  Yes.

  I wrapped my fingers around the Stylus as the item whispered promises of power. Breaking and binding, hunh? It would be so easy—but what was the cost? Forbidden artifacts were usually forbidden for a reason.

  Shaking with emotion, I pulled open the inside pocket of my leather jacket. With an effort of will, I slipped the ornate stylus of yellowed bone back against the inner seam. Best to forget about it completely. With luck, no one would be able to sense its presence the way Terael had while he connected with me.

  “Is that pulse-sucker still in my office?” I demanded.

  He gathers those things for which he came. Terael’s mind-speak came across as pensive, bewildered even. I caught images of the Stylus flashing intermittently through his thoughts.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” I assured him. “I’m not going to use it. I don’t know how I got it, and I don’t think I want it, but you keep your mouth shut about it, OK?”

  I keep many of your secrets. I will swear it on my Name.

  “Just keep Kessiel from leaving till I get there,” I responded. “He’s going to explain a few things.”

  Heedless of the threat of guards now, I shouted my power till my hands danced with blue-white flames. While Terael’s place-knowledge still sizzled in my brain, I sprinted through the warren of back halls.

  There would be hell to pay.

  32

  There was only one back office with lights on. In a fury, I kicked the door wide. It opened onto a space that was larger than I expected—part office, part lab, judging by the furniture.

  On the far side of the room, a man with a long blond ponytail leaned over the drawers of a filing cabinet, yanking out photos and papers and stuffing them into a canvas messenger bag. He was at least my height, maybe a little taller. With his distressed jeans and stylish button-down shirt, he looked less like a robber and more like a model for some trendy men’s cologne.

  The way he jumped when I kicked the door open, he wasn’t expecting anyone to disturb his larcenous search, though he recovered quickly enough.

  “You!” he cried in a voice eerily reminiscent of Remiel’s. Baring his fangs theatrically, he pulled out a gun. I did that preternatural speed trick and threw myself behind a big metal desk situated at the end of the room. As I crouched there trying to determine my next move, I reminded myself to find that Kimber Lil had mentioned, and reacquaint myself with its use. It sucked dodging bullets without the luxury of being able to return fire.

  At least he wasn’t shooting yet.

  “Kessiel, I presume?” I called from behind the desk.

  “I didn’t believe it when they said you’d survived that leap from the ship. We’ve made a game of searching for you, you know,” he taunted.

  “I’m flattered. Really.”

  In answer, he put a few bullets into the desk—as if they were punctuation. It wasn’t fair. The gun had a silencer, so I barely heard it when he squeezed off a shot. The sound of the bullet smashing into the metal was louder than the little cough it made exiting the chamber.

  Kessiel took a few casual steps—no hurry—and moved to flank me. Keeping my body low, I darted from behind the desk, heading for a long, freestanding counter with heavy cabinetry underneath. There were two of them, arranged parallel to one another in the approximate middle of the lab, both covered with equipment, sorting bins, and other important-looking clutter.

  He squeezed off another shot and it smashed into the wall just over my shoulder. He wasn’t even aiming.

  “You having fun putting holes in my office?” I called out. “You’re a worse shot than most storm troopers.”

  “I’m not supposed to kill you, Anakim,” he sneered, “but that doesn’t mean I can’t hurt you. So why don’t you save us both some pain and tell me where you stashed the things you stole? We’ll start with the easy answers.

  “Where are the demon jars?”

  That threw me for a loop. Last I’d checked, I was the researcher, not the crook.

  “What makes you think I’d tell you?” I replied.

  “You know, he can give your woman a jar of her own, even without the Stylus,” Kessiel said. “He’s swallowed enough of your tribe for that. It’s only a matter of time before we recover it. Cooperate now, and he’ll consider her release.”

  He wasn’t even pretending to be sincere.

  Realization flashed bright as a magnesium flare. The demon jars were soul prisons—not just for demons. For anything.
That’s why Remy had been offended that I’d kept their presence a secret. There was no telling what—or who—was in them.

  “Fuck you, fang-face!” I shouted.

  “Give us the location of the jars you found, and perhaps he’ll leave you enough of a mind so you don’t shit yourself.” Then he added, “There are worse things than death, Anakim. He’ll bind you both and feed you to the darkness in the depths of the lake.”

  Another bullet whined past me, closer this time. I duck-walked down the length of the counter, relying on my psychic impressions to keep track of my opponent. The bullets were a serious problem. The minute he stopped fucking around, I was going to get shot. I needed to get my hands on his gun, but if I was going to do that, I had to get the drop on him. I started to call power to my hands.

  The air of the room crackled around me, reminiscent of a crossing. My racing thoughts flashed to Terael’s statement about giving me my own domain in “his” museum. I had an idea now what he’d meant, and it gave me a plan.

  Even if I pulled it off, it was going to hurt.

  “Alive doesn’t mean it has to be pretty, Anakim,” Kessiel said. “He can rip the information from your screaming wreck, as long as you still have a pulse—and I’ll watch.”

  Stalling, I asked, “Isn’t sucking my gray matter against some kind of peace treaty? I thought there were oaths and things, after the Blood Wars.”

  Again Kessiel laughed, reminding me of every bad Bond villain.

  “There are loopholes in any oath. Only the primae swore. You didn’t think items of such power could stay buried forever, did you?” He planted another lazy bullet into the wall. “Your whole tribe has earned a reckoning, Anakim. One by one, he’ll swallow your memories, your powers, and every dream you’ve ever held dear.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Mr. Ooky-Spooky and the Eye of Nefer-Ka,” I taunted, using the sarcasm to deflect my own bitter terror. I listened for another cough from the silencer. Once it came, I jumped up from behind the counter—then stepped straight into the Shadowside.

  It was just like I thought. The entire room was a crossing. I whispered a silent thanks to Terael, even as the rapid transition tore the breath from my lungs. Slamming through that hard and fast was about as painful as I’d expected it to be. I stumbled, but managed to stay upright and maintain my momentum.