In Bonds of the Earth (Book of the Watchers 2)

by Janine Ashbless

  “Whoah. Back up. Veisi was in Lalibela?”

  “Yes. She took a whole load of friendly fire, and the Adversary rescued her after Azazel took off. I saw that before I passed out. I think he’s blackmailed her into trapping Azazel and Penemuel at her place. She’s a narcissistic bitch but she loves her daddy, so I guess she thinks she’s keeping him safe.”

  “They’re trapped?”

  “I think so. I’ve seen them.” I passed my hand across my forehead. “In my dreams, you know. I keep trying, but I can’t get Azazel to snap out of…whatever it is he’s doing. He can’t hear me. Or he doesn’t want to. I think he’s keeping Penemuel alive. She was really badly wounded, and I think he’s sustaining her.”

  Egan stirred. “Her?”

  “Angels are pretty flexible on the whole body thing. You should have guessed that.”

  “Ah, grand.”

  “Anyway. I get the feeling… Have you heard of those monkey-traps where they put nuts in a pot with a narrow neck, and the monkey can’t pull its hand out because it refuses to drop the nuts? I think Azazel’s the monkey. If he lets go of Penemuel she’ll die, so he’s trapped there.” Which is why he didn’t come back for me, I wanted to add. He hadn’t forgotten me; he just can’t do two things at once. It’s not his fault! “And Roshana’s standing guard now. She won’t let me near.”

  “Jealous of you?”

  “Territorial enough to set armed men on me.”

  “Oh, this is not good.”

  “Really? I thought you’d be doing the bloody Riverdance right now. Azazel’s trapped. That’s what you wanted all along, wasn’t it?”

  Egan’s lips were drawn back from his teeth. “Are you sure Veisi is thousands of years old?”

  “Yes. Azazel recognized her from way back.”

  He pressed the tips of his fingers together, frowning at them. “Do you know why the Israelites were forbidden to consume the blood of any animal, in Leviticus?”

  I wet my lips. “No.”

  “The further back you go, the stronger the Watcher…strain is. Their contribution to the human animal. It’s much weakened after the first generation, the real Nephilim as it were…though you get the odd throwback of course, giants like Goliath of Gath. Maybe, just like there’s four percent Neanderthal in non-Africans or whatever it is, there’s a bit of angel in all of us. Maybe it’s what makes us the way we are. But it doesn’t seem to be exactly a DNA thing. Maybe it’s not a properly biological thing at all, but it is carried in the bloodline. Like Original Sin.”

  “I’m Orthodox, remember. We don’t do Original Sin.”

  He blinked. “Really? You lot don’t believe in the Fall then?”

  “That we are subject to death, yes. Just not that we have any innate tendency to evil.”

  “I see. There’s optimism.” He looked into his coffee cup. “The point I was making is that blood has powerful spiritual connotations, always has. It can cleanse. It is shed deliberately to pay for guilt. But other contact with it makes people ritually unclean. It’s too powerful to be used casually.”

  It carries intent between the spheres.

  “Okay,” I said cautiously, not sure where he was going.

  “There’s Watcher blood in animals too, or there was for a long time. The Bull of Knossos, the Horses of Achilles, the Roc, the boar Twrch Trwyth, the Glas Gaibhnenn cow back in Ireland…”

  “Oh,” I said. “Eww.”

  “You’re not the only one to think that way. The strongest, the best, the most flawless of beasts…they were the ones that had to be sacrificed. Firstborns too, though we aren’t sure whether that was just superstition or whether there really is a connection. Anyway, it’s no longer really relevant. We seem to have mopped up the animal strain. The thing is…it was considered important, vitally important, not to let people drink any blood that the Watchers might have tainted.”

  “Why not?”

  “It prolongs life. Not for everyone you understand. I doubt it’d do you or me any good. But for one of the Nephilim to drink the blood of another—or generational relatives—would allow them to carry on indefinitely. Power adds to power. We’re told they were incredibly violent, and they fought each other as well as killed humans. And when men could no longer sustain them, the giants turned against them and devoured mankind. And they began to sin against birds, and beasts, and reptiles, and fish, and to devour one another’s flesh, and drink the blood, says the Book of Enoch. So if Roshana Veisi is as old as you say…” He trailed off, his silence as loaded as his words.

  I shook my head. “She’s been drinking blood? What, like a vampire?”

  “I guess these stories have to come from somewhere.”

  “And whose? If there were loads of Nephilim kicking about still, wouldn’t we know?”

  Egan looked pained. “Well there’s one obvious solution to the lack of tainted blood.”

  “What?”

  “You breed your own.”

  “What? You mean—her chil—” I shut myself off and bounced up from my seat, too horrified to sit still. “No, no way—no woman would do that!” But as I paced in a small, desperate circle I couldn’t help picturing all those children’s portraits in the back hall. If she did it, if she memorialized them, for God’s sake…then she is totally fucked in the head.

  I sat down again, gracelessly. Egan was watching me, his face pulled into lines of concern. The question that had been gestating under my breastbone clawed its way up into my throat.

  Honeycomb.

  “What would happen if one of the Nephilim drank actual angel blood?” I asked.

  He chewed his lip and drummed his fingers on the tabletop. “I’ve never heard of such a thing happening,” he said with great precision. “Do you believe that’s what Veisi is planning?”

  That was what he thought, quite clearly.

  “Penemuel’s wounded. But I can’t believe Ur— that the Adversary would allow that,” I muttered, more to myself than to my companion. “I can’t. He doesn’t think much of the Christian Church but he follows his orders, that’s what he says. The Divine Plan. If he’s enabling her to… Oh, that really is a marriage made in Hell.”

  “It’s not good. Now what I really want to know, Milja, is why you’re telling me this.”

  “What?”

  “As you say, what you’ve just described is a situation largely to my advantage. Your man is trapped—or at least gone to ground, and not currently presenting a danger to humanity—and that’s exactly what my people have been trying for all along. Veisi is a wild card, but that’s a separate issue. You’re far from stupid. Why would you tell me all this? Why would you tell me where he is?”

  I pressed my damp palms against the laminate. “Because you’re going to help me save him.”

  16

  COLORS OF THE FALL

  Egan sat back, holding his cup like he was about to raise a toast. “Right so. This is going to be interesting.”

  “Azazel is trapped, sort of, but he can break out anytime he chooses to ditch Penemuel. Or if she dies. I think he’s keeping her alive, but that’s all—if he could have healed her, he’d have done it by now for certain. He’s keeping her going, and me and Roshana are keeping him going by paying him attention. Just about, anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “The moment that balance slips and she dies, he’s going to come back and he is going to be pissed. You think he’s been vengeful up till now? You have no idea! Christians killed his angel BFF?—he will set out to teach them a lesson with extreme prejudice. Do you get it? Azazel has been restrained so far, believe it or not.”

  Egan blinked slowly.

  “Right now you’re thinking about calling in a Vatican SWAT team and taking him out while he’s at his weakest, aren’t you?” I picked up a fry and jabbed it in his direction. “Two Watchers for the price of one, as well? Thing is, you don’t know where he is. That’s a whole big forest out there. And Roshana is not going to let you guys waltz across her land
and take her daddy away from her. She is way more dangerous than she looks, I can tell you.”

  Egan’s eyebrows rose and he inhaled through his nose, but he waited.

  “But the real reason you’re going to help me is that you need Penemuel alive and onside. You can leave Azazel to me. If you weren’t just bullshitting me about a negotiated solution, then she’s the one you have to save.”

  “Really.”

  “Really. She’s smarter than he is—even he’ll admit that. She thinks stuff through more than he does, and she’s more cautious, and she worries about long-term consequences. She’s interested in books and the betterment of humanity. She’s the one you can negotiate with.”

  I shut up, holding my breath.

  For a while Egan just looked into my face, as if trying to weigh my soul. “But will your man listen to her? Especially if I’m in on this?”

  “He doesn’t know your full involvement back at the monastery. I never told him. He thinks you were just bait.”

  “Well that explains why I’m still alive, I guess.” His voice was low and unnaturally calm. “But that’s not the incident I was thinking of.”

  I blushed, to my own surprise. I’d thought I was all on top of that memory. “He’s not jealous, not like a normal guy,” I mumbled. And that was true enough as far as it went. I knew Azazel felt a wicked proprietary pleasure when others were turned on, whenever he put me on sexual display. He’d even indulged Egan in a cruel threesome (kinda-sorta-only-that-once-and-we-will-never-mention-it-again), of course. I didn’t suppose he could even picture ordinary human men as rivals. Quite how far his kinky tolerance would stretch if his ego was genuinely threatened, and it wasn’t just a dream but real life sex, I didn’t know. “He’s complic— No, not ‘complicated,’ no. Just different. And if we save Penemuel, he’ll be grateful. He knows what gratitude is.”

  “I have to say that from my perspective he comes across as a selfish, sociopathic dick—”

  “He saved your life, remember? When you got shot.”

  “Yeah. But, to continue, I do trust your judgment, Milja. If you see something in him—other than the obvious,”—Egan pulled the face of a straight man trying to grudgingly acknowledge another guy’s penis without actually picturing it—“then I have to accept that he may have his finer qualities.”

  “Wow.” I smiled weakly. “Breakthrough.”

  “I said ‘may’.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Don’t break out the balloons and the streamers just yet. What exactly is it that you want me to do?”

  “Get me to their physical location. I’ve got the best maps I could buy, but it’ll mean going across country, and there’s no way I can do that on my own. Plus, Roshana’s got armed security, and you know what Americans are like about trespassers.”

  “Sounds like my skillset, sure.”

  “We need to save Penemuel. Angels, even fallen ones, need care or attention or love, however you want to put it, and I think if they haven’t got God they need humans instead. We’re the ones with the divine spark. Even the Adversary keeps his icons in churches, under his archangel name. So we need to need her to get better.” I thrust out my lip. “I wish I’d thought of a better way to say that. But you get the idea, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then when she’s okay, we can talk. Are you in?”

  “I’ll think about it.” He pulled his wallet out and shed some bills onto the table.

  “What?”

  “Milja, you’ve just proposed me setting two Watchers free on the world.”

  “But it could fix everything.”

  “It could. Though I can’t see we’d be negotiating with her from a position of strength. Which makes me nervous.”

  “You’ve got hostages. Worst case scenario, you can kill them.”

  He looked at me, not blinking.

  “Come on, the various religions have to be holding on to nearly two hundred hostages across the world. Don’t tell me you hadn’t thought of that, Egan, because I just won’t believe you.”

  He sighed. “I’m a little surprised you did, that’s all.”

  “Yeah well, hang around with ruthless people long enough and some of it rubs off on you.”

  “Am I that ruthless?”

  I don’t know. “I meant Roshana,” I said, breaking eye contact.

  He rubbed his forehead. “Okay…as I said, I’ll think about it. It’s late. Shall I walk you to your car?”

  “My cabin’s actually just across the road there. Thank you.”

  We walked in silence out across the parking lot, not too close to each other. He’d held the restaurant door open for me, but been really careful not to brush against me. The stars overhead were partly occluded by wispy cloud, and I could hear pines sighing in the night breeze, but this spot seemed sheltered. It wasn’t that cold, not as a mountain-bred girl like me thought of cold, but Egan jammed his hands into his sheepskin pockets like he was scared of what they might do unfettered.

  We crossed the road into the cabin complex. My desire to bury my face against his chest was so fierce it made me dizzy, and I knew I really wasn’t mad at him anymore. I took a gulp of night.

  “Egan… Will you forgive me for what happened in the hotel? Please?”

  He stopped, but it took a moment before he could turn to face me. “Forgive you? Are you sorry it happened?”

  “I’m sorry I hurt you. I’m sorry I betrayed your trust.” That was as far as I could go. I couldn’t lie to him.

  He sighed. “Milja, you’re not the one that needs forgiveness.”

  “You think you do? Oh come on, no.”

  “I wasn’t honest or open with you since the start. I led you astray. And I put you under…pressure.”

  “Egan…” It was hard to keep the frustration from crackling through the pain in my words. “Stop doing that, please.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Acting like I’m the victim every time; that it’s never my decision, it’s always Azazel or you making a fool out of me. Like I’ve got no idea what I want, or what I like.”

  His face, in the glow of the distant security light, was a mask.

  “Yeah, you could have been more honest. But I did what I did because I wanted it, and I’m really sorry that I got it wrong but you didn’t make me. I enjoyed doing it.”

  “That’s no guide to what’s right,” he said hoarsely. “Just the opposite.”

  He’s got love and guilt more confused than you can imagine.

  “You know I love you, don’t you?” It must have been the least romantic confession in the history of the world. I said it in despair, because it was the only way I could think of to get through to him. When all else fails, girl, try the truth.

  “Milja… Oh, that’s not good for you, or for me.” The mask was rigid, unchanged, but in the weird light I could see the gleam of a wet line down his taut cheek. “And it’s not an excuse.”

  I felt my lungs crumple inside me. Somehow, despite all that I’d been through, I’d held on to a girlish faith that love solved everything. That all it took was the magic words and the world would flip around and ta da everything would be fixed.

  It had fixed nothing.

  He saw me back to my door and left without another word.

  I lay on my bed and stared at the varnished planks of the ceiling, and dared for the first time to try and get my head around the fact that I loved, craved, cared and lusted for Azazel—and that I felt all those things for Egan too.

  It made no sense to me. Love was all-consuming and all-excluding. Wasn’t it? That’s what I’d been told all my life. You knew that you loved someone because they made you feel complete. Two people making one whole. One flesh.

  That didn’t leave room for a third.

  How was it that I could be aching for them both?

  Egan took me to a big sports outfitters to buy outdoor gear fit for a few days in the wild. Rations, packs, fishing line, a pup tent he could carry,
sleeping bags, warm and waterproof clothes in autumnal camouflage colors, mosquito repellent; the whole shebang. He also stocked up on ammunition for a pistol which he apparently already owned, and chose a hunting slingshot that looked to my jaundiced eye to be made of equal parts NASA engineering and machismo.

  He tried to pay using his card, but it was declined by the machine so I bought the whole lot with cash. I didn’t even feel guilty anymore.

  “What’s up?” I asked as we wheeled our trolley out of the store and he slipped his credit card wallet back into his ass pocket, grimly.

  “That’s the office pulling on my leash. They want me to report in right now.”

  “Are you going to? Yes-or-no answer, please.”

  He sighed. “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Oh for goodness sake…”

  “Look, I’ll need to get back in contact at some point. They’re my superiors, and I don’t have any choice. But I’ll wait until we have a result with Penemuel. Will that do you?”

  “I suppose.”

  “Fine. We’re going to be on our own out there, you realize. No backup. No cavalry.”

  “We won’t need it once we’ve got Azazel.”

  “Yeah, feel free to imagine how that fills me with enormous joy and anticipation.”

  The wilderness landscape of the Minnesotan Great Woods meant that we couldn’t get anywhere close to our goal by road, not without coming at Roshana’s ranch head-on. We drove up to a village a few lakes over, using Egan’s vehicle since I was worried mine might be recognizable. I didn’t know what the two hitmen had reported back, or how long Uriel had condemned them to blindness, but I had to work with the assumption that Roshana knew I was still alive.

  There was a long-distance walking trail that started from behind a diner where we left the car, and before we set off we made sure to give the impression of just another hiking couple out to spend a few days enjoying the colors of the fall in all their glory. Three hours up the trail we struck off southward across country, disappearing amongst the trees.