“The Father is one of us now,” Sorrow said. “I am sorry I ever doubted you and your Darkness. But, John, you no longer have a choice in the matter. You must come with us when we go back to God Almighty. The deed you have done here has put a divine taint on your soul that none save God Almighty can erase.”
A taint they well knew, he suspected. “I already made the choice to do so.”
“But you can no longer afford to alter your choice. Facing death, especially for a mortal, often causes the mortal to change his mind.”
“Very well,” John said. “There’s no enjoyment in what I just did. I’d rather not have to do this again.”
“Too bad,” Sorrow said. “This must be an acquired taste.”
“Save us from such acquisitions,” Bais said. She sighed. “Okay, since this was my hunch, I guess I’d better follow through.” She picked up the Godkiller Rod and examined it. “Nice,” she said, curtly.
“You want a bit of moral advice?” John said, facing both Reed and Bais. They nodded. “Don’t forget we’re functioning under the aegis of the Daughter of Light’s restrictions. You can’t attack these Paladins or their backers unless they attack first; nor can you continue your attack if they flee. If you do…”
“I break the restrictions and free the Fallen Angels from the restrictions as well because I’m a nasty rule-breaking Telepath,” Bais said. “I understand.” She smiled. “No problem. I’ve had as much practice with this form of twisty behavior as you’ve had with your evil.” Pause. “In my own hunchbacked way.”
“That hunch is already clear,” Reed said. John winced. Bais ignored him. “Luckily, we’re Telepaths and trust our own hunches.”
“Interesting,” Wisdom said, half bowing to Bais and Reed. He, and Sorrow were the only Fallen Angels who had remained close by. Even Cunning had backed away, rapidly, after Bais picked up the Godkiller Rod. “I believe your actions right now count as official help from those you name the Ha-qodeshim. I formally thank them. You ease my soul.”
“Well, bucko, thank them again if this works, because I’m not yet a hundred percent convinced,” Bais said. “Let’s go try and bash in some Paladin heads, why don’t we, Reed?”
42. (Dave)
Betrayer spoofed out without a word of praise or instruction, blankly showing less than inhuman emotions. “Okay, I give up,” Dave said, with a huff of exhaustion. He cleared a space on the cold floor and sat, supporting himself on the iron wall and sending roaches scurrying from a pile of spent meals they still hadn’t figured out how to get Betrayer’s insane robots to bus. Betrayer’s robots clanked when they stood still. They wore non-functional blinking lights like sequins on a teenager’s prom dress. They spoke 80’s era computer synthesized speech. Without contractions. Gaah. “Two days of full cooperation and I’d swear she’s more pissed at us than before.”
“I think you’re right,” Elorie said. She sat on the bed, their cell’s one towel, now horribly soiled, on her left arm, used as a cold compress. She had acquired a flash burn when her area coverage leaked. Although she could easily cover the entire cell now, when she did so her immune coverage often leaked and came apart at the most inopportune moments and let magic through. The failures drove Elorie crazy. Dave decided not to speak about the problem, not wanting to pick a fight.
Dave’s area telepathic immunity coverage had its own problems, as he had a hell of a time projecting his mind shields over an area he couldn’t see. He had lost coverage of Elorie three times when he had turned his back on her, so far. She showed the wounds of his failings.
“So, do you have any ideas about what we could do?” Dave said. “I’m out of ideas right now.” He ached with hunger, and had ever since Betrayer blew off his foot. His mind swam, his back in pain from when Betrayer tossed him earlier in their day’s training. Rag doll sack ball….
“Uh kinda huh,” Elorie said, then rolled back and stared at the ceiling. “I’m not sure how to get there from here, though.”
“Meaning what?” Dave said, hearing exasperation, the fight entering Elorie’s voice again.
She grunted. “I…” She stopped speaking and hugged herself. “We agreed to table our personal problems until we got out of here, but I’m beginning to think we’ve got it backwards.”
Dave closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the wall. He didn’t want to go back over some idiotic regurgitated point from many fights ago, or whatever Elorie thought important right now. Not with his mind spinning in utter exhaustion. “Listen,” Dave said, and pointed to the vertical pipes. Fighting sleep, he kept his eyes closed and listened to the distant moaning or howling vibrating though his skull. He now thought might be something else entirely, something familiar. He tried to make out the patterns. “I think someone’s singing,” he said. The vibrations of his own voice contrasted oddly with the vibrations from the distant song.
“Four part cat harmony, perhaps?”
“The sound’s distorted because of the pipes.” He picked his head up and sang along: “Every street lamp seems to beat a fatalistic warning. Someone mutters and the streetlamp gutters. And soon it will be morning.”
Elorie inhaled in shock, and then chimed in herself, in song: “Memory - all alone in the moonlight. I can smile at the old days. I was beautiful then. I remember the time I knew what happiness was. Let the memory live again.” She paused and spoke. “I was right the first time with my four cat harmony idea, and since I don’t believe Betrayer would be singing Grizabella, from Cats, I think that’s got to be Persona.”
“Which means we’re in Betrayer’s Lair!” Dave said. Ahhh.
Unfortunately, the only thing they knew about Betrayer’s Lair was Persona’s claim that the place was insane, and that Betrayer held half of her there. Here. “I actually miss Persona,” Dave said.
“Do you miss her as a person, or do you miss having her heal you?” Elorie said, and laughed.
“Both. I miss her catty comments when she’s inside me. We had some interesting, um, insult matches. Snark matches?”
“Oh, save me!” She laughed again, and then continued on, quieter. “I miss her inside me as well. I miss her inside the both of us most of all.”
Dave closed his eyes and leaned back again, remembering those pleasurable nights. Elorie wanted to make up. He could hear the emotional desire in her voice. She didn’t know how to start making up, save by restarting the fight. Which meant that she thought he needed to pony up with something.
Ponies were in short supply here, though. All he had were old nags.
On the other hand, he had been sitting on something for days, hording his idea for a life-saving situation, in case Elorie went ape-shit on him again. Now? His plan wouldn’t work. Not with him on the floor – in pain – and Elorie on the cot-sized jail bed – in pain. Dave took a deep breath and decided to bull forward and gamble. He rolled to his knees, crawled over to the bed, and then up. Elorie examined him closely, peering at his face and cocking her head around several times, before she let him, carefully, put his right arm over her shoulder and give her a quick hug.
“Remember when you accused me of looking at Diana with an eye to the future?” Dave said, anxiously neutral.
Elorie grunted and turned away.
“You were right,” Dave said. “I can’t explain why. I can promise to stop, though, now that I realize it hurts you.”
“Yah, okay,” Elorie said. “You want a hint?”
“A hint?” Dave furrowed eyebrows. Elorie stared down a wall. The wall didn’t burst into flame. “A hint about what? Why I did what I did?”
“Uh huh.”
Dave mirrored Elorie’s earlier actions and studied her face. Without telepathy, they were back to being normal mortals. They weren’t normal, though. Elorie said she was, at times, connected to the willpower tides, her words for something nobody else had ever described. Dave had guessed she sensed the shared Mission of the 99 Gods, but she just shrugged. Dave got hunches now, far more than he had eve
r gotten before. Even with his mind shields full up, he still did. Such as right now, a bad hunch that Elorie had figured everything out and he wouldn’t like her revelation. “Okay,” he said, anyway. He bit back his usual ‘hit me’. No need to invite any literal interpretations.
Elorie bit her lip for a moment – ah, this bit of her personal insight would be fighting words if someone said them to her. He nodded wordless permission. “You’re afraid I’m going to ditch you, the way Tiff did,” she said. “We got together too soon. You’re not over Tiff and you’re not over your divorce.”
Oh.
“Okeedokie,” Dave said, again. Elorie made a sour lemon face. He squeezed her, sure she would never understand his humor. “I, well… Uh… I believe you and I understand where you’re coming from, but, well, I thought my fears were real. Are real.” Dave gulped a pause. “Aren’t they? I mean, we’ve been together longer than any of your old…”
“Arrrrgh!” Elorie said, eyes upraised to heaven. “Dave, we’re married.”
“Uh huh.” So?
“My other relationships? Not a marriage among them.”
“So.” Oh. “You see marriage as different?”
“Of course I see marriage as different, you clod! Dave! You don’t?”
Dave had to close his eyes. “Uh. Remember how I said I’ve never been one for one night stands or quick relationships?”
“Yah.” A bit of ire, here, ire he had better fix, and quick. No trips to Ireland today, please.
“I guess I’ve always been unwilling to get involved with women I didn’t consider marriage material.”
Elorie stiffened. “This is supposed to make me feel better?”
“Yes,” Dave said. “Either I’m not communicating this well, or we…”
“Oh, I understand you,” she said. “Diana? You think Diana…”
“I hadn’t gotten to there with Diana,” Dave said, not wanting to mention his contingent hunches that he could end up married to Diana. “I hadn’t even dated Diana. I’m so far from becoming intimate with Diana I…”
“Okay, got it the first time you stuck a period at the end of a panicked clause.” Elorie relaxed and gave him a hug and peck on the cheek. “You embarrass so easily.” Now he reddened. “We’re suffering from a difference in our life philosophies. We have a lot of those…”
“Uh huh.”
…and the fingernail in the ribs, right on schedule.
“…and I don’t think any of these philosophical differences are as big a problem as you’re afraid they are,” she said. “It’s a broadening of our experiences, like your wonderful stories.”
She liked his stories? Neat. “You mean your wonderful stories, El.”
She laughed. “Stereotypically, it’s men who are loose with their relationships and women who are picky and relationship-happy. So I’m not going to complain at all about you treating your intimate relationships as trial marriages. Mine weren’t.” Her most closed-mouthed subject.
“Willing to share the details?”
“Well, no. Not yet,” Elorie said. “Let’s just say the one I told you about, the guy I almost married…that relationship was as intense as one of your intimate relationships. And I didn’t end the damned thing.”
Ah. He remembered the outlines of the story; he hadn’t known the fullness of her pain, an ongoing hurt.
“Someday I’d like to hear more about your relationship with Iris’s father, if you’re not categorizing your relationship with him in the same bin,” Dave said. Elorie twitched. “I don’t need to hear about him now.” He paused, held up his hands in surrender and let Elorie react, which she did by icing up, defensive. “I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but you think marriage is a firm commitment and you’re a little leery about my, um, relative lack of commitment shown by my words describing my intimate relationships as marriage-like.”
“You said it. I was afraid to.” She turned away. “I’m not disagreeing.”
“Ouch. So we’ve both been looking at each other and thinking the other is commitment shy, eh? I’d say that we’ve got a communication problem, El.”
“Proof again that you’re a master of the obvious,” Elorie said, this time raising only one eyebrow and eyeball roofward.
“Uh huh, that’s me,” Dave said. He sighed. All his intimates complained the same. “I truthfully never thought someone might look at me as a serial-divorce addict. To me, divorce is a failure, a bad thing…but I’m not, um, afraid of failure. Failures happen, something you moan about later. Failures are something you learn from so they don’t happen again.”
“Marriage to me is formal, binding and sacred,” Elorie said. “Dave, marriage for me is a onetime affair. The same as life, or the way life used to be before Dubuque started raising the dead. I’m not planning on marrying again. I’m not planning on divorcing you, either, and if you try and divorce me, you’re going to meet some nasty lawyers, all of whom live in Manhattan and owe me favors, really big favors.”
She smiled, chucked him under the chin and pulled his nascent beard to twist his head toward her. “Or, my calculating cold hearted spouse, I’ll just kill you myself.”
He laughed. “Now there’s my Elorie.” He sighed. “In my book, I’m no more cold hearted and calculating than you are, my dear. We just have different cold hearted calculations and plans.”
“You think I’m cold hearted?” Elorie said. “Me?” She licked her lips. “I think you’re confusing me with at least two or three or four other women.” She backed off a second and cocked a pose that would have been a lot hotter and sexier if she hadn’t had half the hair burned off her head, if her face and arms weren’t covered with cuts, bruises and burns and she looked less like a grime-pit. “Cold I’m not.”
Dave laughed. “Remember how this backwards marriage crap attracts similar people? Well, I think all six of us are cold-hearted monsters. No. Scratch the ‘I think’. Replace with an ‘I know’.” Elorie shook her head and again mouthed the word ‘me?’ She didn’t understand. Dave hadn’t realized.
“El, you’re a heart-breaker. You’ve always been attractive, and when you go all out you’re gorgeous, in a way that leaves men and women dying with their hearts cut out behind you.”
“And women?”
“I’m positive. I double dated quite a few times with a pair of lesbian friends of Tiff’s, and I got to learn, um, the subtle differences.” Dave had found he shared their approximate taste in women, which had hacked Tiff off until she got the joke and realized her soccer-buddy lesbian friends politely panted for Tiff as well. Then Tiff found the entire line of discussion quite fun.
“Oh, this sounds like an interesting story, but let’s get back to this leaving hearts cut out behind me nonsense. I’m not a tease.”
“Except when you want to be or can’t help but be.”
“Huh?”
“Like when you’re concentrating on something physical. It’s devastating,” Dave said.
Elorie bit her lips. “For example?”
Dave twisted so he sat on the edge of the bed. “This would work better if I could stand up.” He bowed his back, raised up his head, spread his arms wide and splayed his fingers. “This is what you look like when you’re focusing your immunity,” he said. “Only don’t picture me, picture you with your face and, um, chest.”
She bounced those two articles and laughed. “That’s attractive?” She paused and continued with a whisper: “I thought I looked like a fool.”
“You would not believe.” He easily pictured what this would look like when Elorie was done up at her best, and practically shivered.
“Okay, okay,” she said. “But what’s this about me wanting to be a tease?”
“Like with Orlando.” Dave curled up beside her again.
Elorie rolled her eyes. “Okay, I wanted to yank Orlando’s chain. Hard. That man needs some heavy-duty socialization lessons, in my humble opinion.”
“That makes teasing him okay?”
“To me? Yes.”
Learn something new every day.
“Okay, how about Jack, Darrel and Osham, from the Ecumenist quest.”
“Completely professional.” She gave him the crease-between-the-eyebrows expression. “Darrel, you say? He hated my guts.”
“Only from the front. He gave you the eye when your back was turned.”
Elorie snorted.
“And from your question, you knew about Jack and Osham’s interest.”
“But that’s not me, Dave.”
“You did spend a night with them.”
“Remember ‘we’re not doing anything that we don’t both agree on’?”
“Remember, yes. Agree your words succeeded at being ‘professional distancing’? No, not in the slightest. Elorie, you broke them to your harness by ripping out their hearts. On purpose. And you enjoyed doing so.”
She froze for a moment. “I don’t know if I should slug you or praise you for the best compliment you’ve ever given me.” Persona continued to sing in the distance. She had a good voice, at least in Dave’s imagination.
“There’s more to this, El.”
Elorie sighed and nodded. “I’ve heard this one before. Ken said something similar when…” Elorie turned red.
“Yes?”
“When you had your little dance floor experience.”
Dave blinked.
Elorie narrowed her eyebrows. “What, you thought the little escapade on the dance floor escaped our notice?”
Oopsie. Perhaps his little adventure with Nessa was what lay behind Elorie’s attitude problem. “I apologize…”
“For what? Dave, Ken and I went over that one for hours, and decided Nessa’s hunch was correct: the only way to blast through your mind shields would be when she was in total control of you and when you were in a moment of, um, transcendent pleasure. You were blameless then, and in all the naked shenanigans afterwards.” He opened his mouth to apologize anyway, but Elorie put her hand over his mouth. “Nope. Don’t say a word. And don’t you dare think I’ve been fighting with you because of what Nessa did to you.”
99 Gods: Odysseia Page 46
