Conspiracy of Angels

by Michelle Belanger

  Remy asked what was wrong, but his words came slowly into focus. Wanted to know if I was OK, what was happening to me. I shook him off—or tried to. It wasn’t easy with my hands still bound behind my back.

  I ignored him.

  “Hey, Sal,” I called over his shoulder. “Fuck your plan.”

  Gulping a breath, I willed myself across the weakened barrier, and left my brother clutching empty ropes.

  44

  Red mist boiled around Sal and Remy as I made the transition. Before the blood-soul of the Nephilim obscured her features entirely, Saliriel flashed a knowing smile at me. She appeared intensely… pleased.

  It wasn’t the look I was expecting.

  Remy’s grip upon my abruptly empty bonds sent him tumbling backward to the floor. He raised his voice in dismay. Broken snippets of his words carried across to the shadowed realm in which I stood.

  “…can’t do that. Not… all this water!”

  “…told you… find a way.” Sal’s smug satisfaction rang unmistakably.

  The red-mist wings of my brother’s Shadowside presence twitched as he got back to his feet. Not all his movements translated clearly, but I could still picture the way he fussed to straighten the lines of his suit jacket.

  “…don’t understand,” he objected. “…not safe… over the lake.” Whatever boundary stood between us stole half his words, but the worry was clear in his tone. I could almost see the shape of the emotion agitating the crimson echo he’d become. Saliriel’s blood-soul vibrated calmly, both brighter and denser than Remiel.

  “…wasn’t safe… this side,” she answered. “…done it before… part of the plan.” She turned as if that should be the end of it.

  Bitterly, I wondered which plan, and how much of it she’d bothered to share with either of us. While I pondered Sal’s intricate machinations, a phantom soldier flickered to life near my elbow. Reflexively, I stepped out of his way. The deck beneath my boot buckled startlingly. Swiftly, I found surer footing—but it wasn’t easy.

  Not every aspect of the old gunboat translated perfectly. Uneven portions of its gray-tone corpus appeared eaten away. The edges of those holes glimmered with a substance slick and black as a cacodaimon. I shuddered, supposing what that might mean. The soldier walked through me again with all the self-awareness of a video replay.

  Picking my way across the uncertain flooring, I headed toward the door. Closed tight on the skinside, it sketched a filmy echo on the Shadowside. A current of repeated mortal passage flowed through it, weaker even than what I’d encountered at the museum. I still felt the eddies plucking at me. Lil was out there somewhere, searching for Lailah. It was high time I joined her.

  As I passed between Saliriel and Remy, more broken conversation crossed the boundary.

  “Again… his life at risk…” Remy swept a gesture, agitation painting swirls upon the air. He took a confrontational step nearer to Sal. “…play that card too freely… Providence—”

  I halted, straining to make sense of Remy’s words, even as I caught Sal’s answer in frustratingly tiny scraps.

  “…debt… he bargains… as freely.” The gleaming crimson shadow tossed its head, an intimation of hair floating thin as spider webs. “…know… how he is.”

  “…too well,” Remy assented. His wings slumped in weary resignation. Crossing the room, he bent to the memory of a window. “…do now?”

  “…assuming… demon jars… few moments… Jubiel.” It dropped in and out like a bad cell-phone connection, yet I took the Nephilim’s name as my cue to get moving.

  The oppressive weight of the Shadowside would quickly wear on me. Ghosting from the chart room, I emerged upon the Scylla’s open deck. Washed-out images of Vietnam-era soldiers wavered around me. At the far end of the vessel, a subtle splash of crimson stood out against all the muted grays.

  Jubiel.

  Other hazy echoes fluttered around him. They held hardly any substance. Then something collectively focused their attention. Whatever it was, I couldn’t make it out, and I wasn’t curious enough to waste a walk that far across the vessel. He had mentioned prison cells below decks. If Lailah was still on board, I was sure to find her there.

  As I turned, something careened into my ankle. It tangled in my pants leg with an irritated hiss. With a string of curses, I studied the shadows pooling near my boots and saw—of all damned things—a weasel. Scratch that. It was a ferret. A sleek, squirmy little ferret with blonde fur and bright eyes. It was looking right at me. The minute it noticed that I was looking back, it did this weird, spastic maneuver, arching its spine and dancing from side to side while it chattered urgently.

  Lil, I thought.

  Almost as soon as I did, the chattering increased and the ferret—which was softly glowing in the Shadowside’s perpetual twilight—bounced itself off my ankle again. Scrabbling, it snagged a bit of my pants leg in its teeth, and tugged.

  So it wasn’t just the lioness that could come out to play.

  Lady of Beasts, indeed.

  I followed the excitable creature as it led me toward a covered set of stairs built in the deck. They disappeared into the darker levels below. To my left, the formless waters of the lake stretched to the horizon, a thin memory of rusted railing between me and the yawning deep. Despite my fear—or perhaps because of it—I felt an irresistible urge to peer down into those dark waters. The ferret snarled and yanked on the hem of my jeans, fighting me every step of the way.

  Ignoring the diminutive beast, I drifted toward the water like a comet caught in a black hole’s gravity well. With my heart hammering a desperate rhythm, I dared to take a look.

  The lake surged like oil and shadow, figures drifting in the lightless maw beneath. When we’d first arrived, Jubiel had promised Dorimiel would deal with us once he got topside. At the time, I’d taken that to mean his decimus was working below decks. One look over the railing proved that wasn’t the case.

  The bastard was beneath the gunboat—cavorting with the cacodaimons in the deep places of the lake. I didn’t understand all of what I saw there, but instinct clamored that it was bad—catastrophically bad.

  In the heart of Lake Erie, I saw a quivering hole from one space to the next, its edges shimmering with an absence of light. My eyes swam with its intensity. Things drifted around the edges, almost elegant in their hypnotic undulations. Cacodaimons. I tried not to consider how tiny they seemed as they floated near the fringes of what could only be some hellish crossing.

  I staggered back from the rail with an inarticulate shout. The ferret made angry huffing noises and it nipped my ankle reproachfully with its tiny needle-teeth.

  “Stupid, stupid,” I muttered, hands pressed against my forehead as I sought to drive off the sickening vision. A queasy weakness shuddered through me in its wake. Once I trusted my legs again, I followed the ferret below decks, searching for a place where I could return unnoticed to the flesh-and-blood world.

  The Shadowside here felt less than safe.

  45

  Emerging from the Shadowside at the bottom of the stairs, I stepped into an abattoir. Lil had made good on her promise of wholesale slaughter.

  Corpses littered the narrow halls, most with their throats slit. The wounds gaped like grisly mouths caught in red and silent screams. The stain of recent death lingered oil-slick and shimmering to my psychic senses, so thick I felt I couldn’t breathe. The foul smell didn’t help.

  Room after room revealed half-naked corpses flung across velvet pillows and silken drapes, all pulsing with echoes of their death throes. Orange and black streamers and grinning pumpkin shapes hung from the walls and ceilings, a surreal contrast to the brutality of the scene. Nearly a week had passed since Halloween, but down here, they’d still been partying. The Nephilim took their decadence seriously.

  I stopped counting after a dozen dead, my horror and moral outrage numbed to something hard and cold that ached within my chest. Blood spread across glinting bits of confetti and shatter
ed flutes of champagne. It was impossible not to walk in it, and I tried to ignore the tacky way my boots stuck to the floor, nearly tripping over one of the corpses as I rounded a corner. He was sprawled across the hallway, wearing nothing but a Harlequin mask and pair of leather pants. Blood smeared his face and chiseled abs, gelling in his tangled spill of dreads.

  From what I could see of his face, he couldn’t have been more than twenty.

  Still prompted by my spirit guide, I followed the trail of carnage, and soon caught up with the lady herself. She crouched over a figure in the mess hall, driving what looked like an ice pick into the base of her skull. Wine bottles and party decorations, including half of an elaborate, multi-colored cake, were scattered around the room. The corpse—a dead woman with a long fall of black and purple hair—still had a smear of frosting at the edge of her lush, scarlet lips.

  Lil wasn’t expecting me.

  I kicked a bottle as I ducked in through the door. Without looking in my direction, the Lady of Beasts produced a knife from nowhere, and sent it sailing at me.

  The blade would have found its mark in my throat if not for the ferret. Insubstantial as it was, it let loose a hoarse squeak just as she let the blade fly. At the last possible moment she jerked her hand a little to the left, and the throwing knife went whistling past my ear. It struck the metal wall then skidded across the floor.

  “Idiot!” she growled, eyes flashing.

  “Glad to see you, too, Lil,” I choked.

  “What are you doing here?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to keep him distracted.” There was a hard, cold fury to her expression that I hoped wasn’t intended for me.

  “I want to help you find your sister,” I replied. “I thought you sent your ferret to fetch me.”

  “Is that where she went?” Lil muttered, bending back to the corpse.

  “We can search for Lailah together,” I offered.

  Lil’s expression darkened, and she resumed stabbing the dead woman in the head.

  “Go back up and do your job, flyboy,” she replied. “From now on, I work alone.”

  The tiny creature scurried at her feet, somersaulting around and through the corpse, but Lil seemed determined not to notice.

  “I’m not going back up there with Remy and Sal,” I said, “and Dorimiel is plenty distracted. He’s under the damned ship, communing with the cacodaimons.” I pitched my voice low. “Didn’t you feel that weird wave of power maybe ten minutes ago? I think he opened some kind of crossing for them.”

  “Crossing?” she echoed, her voice a low growl. “For the cacodaimons? That shouldn’t be possible.” The squirming ferret finally managed to catch her attention, and the hard look around Lil’s eyes softened momentarily. Something passed between the two of them, and Lil’s expression darkened again by rapid degrees.

  “Mother’s tears,” she swore. “Dorimiel’s really gone crazy.” She opened her mouth to say something else—but there was a clattering behind us, and back down the hall someone took a sharp inhalation of breath.

  Instantly I stepped out of the open doorway, joining Lil on her side of the room.

  “I thought everyone down here was dead,” I hissed.

  “So did I,” came her whispered response.

  She crouched among the tables and over-turned chairs, all the muscles in her body taut and thrumming. Her long hair was wild, a streak of blood on one cheek echoing the scarlet highlights glinting in its waves. I found myself staring. Lil possessed a deadly beauty which the gore and carnage seemed only to emphasize. My lips tingled where she’d kissed me only once, and thoughts extremely inappropriate to the situation began playing through my mind.

  Gritting my teeth, I tried to shake the full-body flashback.

  Fucking hormones.

  Lil seemed blissfully unaware. Without taking her eyes from the open door, she wiped down the ice pick, stowing it in her purse. Then she scooped up the knife, holding it loosely at her side. Staring at her bloodstained hands, I discovered that she was wearing blue nitrile gloves under all the gore.

  Raising two powder-blue fingers, she indicated her eyes, then pointed toward the hatchway. Balancing on the balls of her feet to avoid striking the floor with the heels of her boots, she moved toward the opening. Checking the hall, she gestured for me to follow.

  But I didn’t share her grace and efficiency, and my footsteps sounded like drumbeats. I barely made it to the door before she gestured sharply, indicating that I should remain behind.

  Fine by me. I wasn’t cut out to be a ninja, anyway.

  Stifled movement echoed down the hall again, but I wasn’t certain where it was coming from. Peering, Lil searched for her prey. Something pale and low to the ground streaked from one doorway to the next, barely visible even to my keyed-up senses. Then it struck me—it was the ferret.

  The little bugger was moving stealthily, exploring each darkened room that lined the hall and conveying some kind of message to its mistress. Shifting my perceptions, I discovered not one, but two ferrets casing the hall. Lil crouched patiently while they worked, not so much as a tremor moving through the muscles of her thighs.

  One of them found something. Its chattering call ghosted to my ears. Lil reacted by pulling a small metal ball from a pocket, and chucking it through an open door.

  The instant it left her hand, Lil crossed the hall and pressed herself flush against the wall beside another open doorway. She waited silently as a college-aged guy with thick round spectacles stepped out cautiously to investigate the source of the disturbance.

  He was wearing what looked like a kimono, though he didn’t have it belted. The front of it trailed open. He was naked underneath. He lofted a makeshift weapon—a champagne bottle, of all things. Blood covered the soles of his bare feet, staining the edges of the kimono. More blood coated the floor, and he nearly slipped in a thick pool of it.

  The poor bastard looked terrified and half-stoned, and he moved like a man caught in a terrible dream. I almost called out to try and save him, but hesitated.

  In that instant, Lil moved in for the kill. The knife flashed, almost too fast to follow. Kimono Guy stiffened, emitting a wet and gurgling noise that could have been a cry, except Lil had cut through his voice box. The guy was half a foot taller than her, but she knew just how to hold the body so the arterial spray arced fully away. She slowly lowered the twitching corpse to the floor, hovering watchfully as he bled out.

  The two ghost-ferrets came tumbling out of the room, bounding nimbly past the freshly made corpse and racing each other down the hall. Lil watched them carefully for a few moments, then finally relaxed, giving me the all-clear.

  “What the hell do you do for a living?” I muttered, still wary of raising my voice.

  “I sell shoes,” she replied, wiping a stray droplet of blood from her cheek. “Now ask me what I do in my spare time.”

  I took an involuntary step back.

  “I don’t think I want to.”

  Her grin only widened. “Smart boy.”

  That was when the ice pick came back out, and she knelt by the dead man, turning his head to one side. With swift, practiced precision, she stabbed it repeatedly into the soft depression at the base of his skull.

  “What are you doing that for?” I asked, swallowing hard. “He’s dead already.”

  “Cacodaimons,” she responded, grunting. “Scramble the brainstem and they can’t ride the body. Didn’t want to believe you. Didn’t want to risk it, either.” I watched for a few moments, then glanced nervously down the hall, alert for any more lurkers.

  “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job,” I ventured, “but shouldn’t we focus more on finding your sister? They’ve got to be keeping her somewhere down here.”

  She stabbed a little harder. The ice pick made unpleasant sucking sounds as she thrust it in and out.

  “Lil?” I said.

  “Fucking drop it, OK?” she said flatly. “They bound her. That’s why I couldn’t sense her. I fo
und her body. She’s been dead at least a day. I couldn’t find the jar they stuck her in, but trust me, I will find it.” There was no fear, no regret, just an adamantine certitude.

  “I’m sorry, Lil,” I managed.

  “Be sorry if we don’t find the jar he put her in,” Lil growled, finally ceasing her mutilation of the corpse. The gore-streaked ice pick still in hand, she stood and rounded on me. She stabbed a blood-smeared finger at my chest. “Be sorry if he’s dumped that jar at the bottom of the lake.”

  There was nothing I could say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. Guilt had a taste, and I could feel it clawing its way up the back of my throat. A day? Had they killed her before I got here the first time, or immediately after?

  It was my fault, either way.

  Lil wiped down the ice pick and stashed it again.

  “I’m done here,” she said. “It’s time for the real fight. You want to be useful? There’s a supply room with propane tanks. Minimal effort. Carry a few up with me, and we’ll make the night glow.”

  “But we’re on a damned boat,” I objected as she started swiftly down one of the narrow corridors. “We have allies up there. Remy, and Sal—”

  Lil snorted.

  “If they get in my way, I’ll blow them up” she called over her shoulder. “Sal I might even aim for.”

  46

  Lil and I each retrieved two of the ball-shaped tanks, then moved topside. Using the shadows to our advantage, we scurried from the steps to a bank of machinery about halfway between the redecorated chart room and whatever occupied Jubiel and his goons.

  They scurried around like ants with an anxiety disorder. A crane rose on that end of the ship, while the main thing that concerned them looked like a giant winch with coils of metal cable running to a carriage swinging out over the water. The cables—some as big around as my wrist—descended into the lake on the side opposite the Daisy Fay.

  The anchor, maybe? I thought. If it was the anchor, though, they were pulling it up. A surge of noise and clatter erupted as they lifted something into the carriage, fixed it there, then maneuvered it onto the deck. It was big. Water sluiced from curving sides, shedding runnels of fine gray silt.