by Vox Day
“Hello, we are three kids in high school, just in case you forgot.” Jami pointed to the math book. “See, that’s why I’ve got to do this stupid algebra. 2X plus 3Y equals who the heck cares!”
Her brother rolled his eyes.
“That’s not the point, James. The point is, I think we should be doing something worthwhile, something that would help make a difference. We can’t do that by sitting around inside here!”
Jami looked out the window to the backyard. It was snowing again, sort of, and even though it was supposed to be spring in a few weeks, there was still plenty of unmelted grey ice bordering the walk and the driveway. The mounds of snow that had been heaped up on the deck over the last four months had shrunk noticeably, but they were still there, dingy and hardened by the icy rain of the last few days. And it was dark, too. The sun had disappeared hours ago, and the night sky was about as close to pitch black as it got this close to the cities this time of year.
“What do you want to do, go out and patrol the neighborhood, looking for fallen angels to mess with? You’ve been watching too much Buffy, Christopher. It doesn’t work like that in real life.”
“I know a lot more about the Fallen than you do.” His voice was starting to rise and she could tell he was getting irritated with her. “So, yeah, maybe that’s exactly what I’m going to do!”
Okay, whatever. She shook her head and fell back onto the couch, reaching for her textbook. She still had ten problems left, and this was just not a conversation she was going to waste any more time on.
“Don’t forget your stake, then,” she said mockingly.
“What?” He looked puzzled, then understanding dawned in his eyes. “Oh, shut up!”
She laughed at him as he spun around and stomped into the front hallway. Still amused, she listened intently as he took a coat and something that sounded like a dog leash from the hall closet, then slammed the front door as he left the house. I wonder if he’s got a paper he’s putting off or something like that, she thought to herself. I’ll bet he’s just procrastinating.
“What was that all about?” Holli asked as she came out of the kitchen.
“Oh, nothing. Christopher’s taking Duke for a walk, that’s all. Who’re you talking to?”
“Derek Johnson. You know him.”
Jami stared at her twin, puzzled.
“Of course I know him, he’s on my indoor team. The senior.” What was up with this? She was surprised Holli even knew the guy. She usually only noticed the football studs and the pretty boys. “So why were you talking to him for so long? Was he calling for me?”
Her twin shrugged innocently.
“Sort of. He said to tell you that Jason somebody—”
“Jason Case?”
“Yeah, that’s what it was. Anyhow, he can’t come on Saturday, so bring someone to play for him if you know anybody.”
“Um, okay. Thanks.” Jami filed a mental note to think about it later and started to return to her algebra, but the equations and numbers now seemed strangely out of focus on the pages in front of her. She closed her eyes hard and blinked, but it didn’t do any good. 2X this, 4Y that, whatever! What little sense the math had been making to her abruptly disappeared in a swirling cloud of cryptic variables.
“Holli?” she called after her sister, who’d vanished into the kitchen again.
“Yeah?” Holli stuck her head around the corner. “What?”
“Did Christopher ever tell you much about what happened to him? You know, about what happened when he was on Ahura Azdha? I mean, like, the stuff that happened before we found him.”
Holli twirled a delicate white curl around her finger and shook her head thoughtfully.
“No, not really,” she said. “I asked him if he wanted to talk about it once, and he said no, so I kind of left it alone.”
Jami nodded. She’d tried prying the story out of Christopher more than once herself, but hadn’t managed to get anything out of him either. She sighed and slumped back on the couch with her arms crossed, thinking about the three times she’d seen him on that ancient world that God’s angel had destroyed. No, it was twice, she corrected herself, because the last time, the time he’d saved them, had been right here on Earth, at the elementary school, of all places.
A vision entered her mind, and she shuddered at the frightening memory of a rage-filled face of gold, the face of a demonic killer of angels, the face of her brother. Oh God, I just thank you so much for rescuing him, she prayed again gratefully, for saving him… wait a minute…. A sudden thought struck her. What was she thinking? Christopher had been an angel-killer himself, and even if Khasar, for one, hadn’t stayed dead, that didn’t mean Christopher didn’t know what he was talking about. He probably did know a lot more about the Fallen than she did, and why, who knew what he might have gotten himself into already?
A moment later, Holli was yelling at her from the kitchen.
“What’s going on? What are you doing?”
“I’m, ah, just going out for a run!” Jami shouted back as she rifled through the coat closet in the front hall. Well, that was true, after all, she was going to run. She felt like telling Holli about her worries, except that they sounded kind of stupid, even to herself. Maybe it’s nothing, after all, she told herself. No sense in freaking both of us out for no good reason. Finally! She found the nylon Adidas pullover she’d been searching for and slipped it over her head, then jammed her feet into her old Nike cross-trainers.
“Back in a few!” she yelled as she ran out the door. Holli might have responded, but outside, the night wind was much louder, and Jami could barely hear the glass storm door as it banged violently shut behind her. It was cold, bitterly cold, and for a second, Jami wondered if she should go back into the house and put on something warmer. But there seemed to be something urgent about this sudden compulsion to find Christopher, so she decided to fight the cold by running instead.
She headed down the culdesac at a quick, but easy pace. It was dark, as there weren’t any streetlights on their dead end street, but she’d run this route dozens of times training for one sport or another, and she knew where she was going. The only question was if Christopher had crossed Johanna Boulevard into Sims Court, or followed it down to the park at the lake. Well, since they lived at the very end of their street, she had a little while before she had to make up her mind.
The big oak trees for which the avenue had been named didn’t look so friendly now by night. Their twisted branches arched high over her head, creaking weirdly like an alien life form muttering threats she couldn’t quite understand. They were like a moaning army of giants, surrounding her on every side. They were giving her the creeps, and she increased her pace in nervous anticipation. The ice-rain stung her face a little bit, but that was okay. At least it gave her something else to think about and kept her imagination from running away with itself. Trees! She snorted, irritated with herself for being so jumpy. What was a tree going to do to her anyhow, fall on her?
Chapter 3
An Evening Run
Yet God hath placed by the side of each a man’s own Guardian Spirit, who is charged to watch over him—a Guardian who sleeps not nor is deceived…. So when you have shut the doors and made a darkness within, remember never to say that you are alone; for you are not alone, but God is within, and your Guardian Spirit, and what light do they need to behold what you do?
—Epictetus
Melusine was not in the mood for all this activity tonight. She’d done her best to distract Christopher from his sudden onset of conscience, but Paulus, Mariel, and Aliel had ganged up on her and kept her away from the boy. It wasn’t her fault, though, because if Pandaema and Dandaela had been where they were supposed to be, namely, here with her and keeping an eye on their twins, the cursed Guardians wouldn’t have been able to push her around.
And now, since Dandaela was still off with Pandaema and her foolish intrigues, Melusine was stuck following Jami. She hoped the little rat would trip a
nd break her neck; after all, it wouldn’t cost her anything if the girl went straight to Heaven, and a little grief and loss might help strengthen Christopher’s fading spirit of bitterness. She sighed as she spread her black wings and coasted on the powerful night winds high above the running girl. The main trouble with demons was that they were so undependable.
What was Pandaema up to anyhow? Melusine was pretty sure that the demoness wasn’t going to interfere with Balazel’s plans, since the archdemon wasn’t one of the local Fallen Lords. Despite his rank, Balazel’s favor meant next to nothing here in the Cities. She knew Pandaema was rather closer to one of the captains of the Mordrim than she liked to let on, and she wondered if that nasty band of brutes was plotting against Prince Bloodwinter again. It wouldn’t surprise her if that was the case; it had been three years since the last major brouhaha and the Principality was almost overdue for another wave of angelic rebellion.
Poor Dandaela. She wasn’t the brightest of angels, in more ways than one, and she still found it thrilling to get involved in Pandaema’s secret plots. But such plots were for fools, and it’s a good thing you’ve finally learned better, Melusine grimly told herself. Her lessons had come the hardest way; before the Black Throne of Judgement. She could almost laugh about her naivete now, almost, but not quite. Five hundred years was a long time to suffer at the hands of the Sons of Sorrow.
She shivered, not at the cold, but at the remembered feel of her tormentor’s soft, misleadingly gentle touch. Of all the spirits she had encountered, Those Who Bring Remorse were the most twisted of all. Surely they had been angels of Raphael’s order once, for how could they know how to cause such pain, if they had not once known how to heal. They were soft of voice, soft of manner, indeed, softness of one kind or another was nearly all she could remember of them now. That, and the pain. Always, there was the pain. How very polite they were, and yet so cruel. She barely remembered what had happened to cause her to fall into their terrifyingly gentle hands.
But she remembered Provence. That summer land, she would never forget. It was the place of her first, and only true possession. How exhilarating it had been, to live and taste and feel life as a mortal, to know the passion of the woman for her lover, to savor, to exult, in the hatred of a father for his son. Ah, those had been heady times indeed, intoxicating enough to leave her drunk with ecstacy and power, and wholly devoid of judgement.
Never again, she vowed for the thousandth, the ten thousandth time, never again would she dare to tread the left-hand path of power. Two rebellions were quite enough for any angel, and now she would be the loyal warrior, the cunning temptress, the artful seducer; whatever was required, and if Lord Balazel saw fit to reward her, then so much the better. If a safe and easy opportunity presented itself, she would not hesitate to seize it, of course. But that was something altogether different, and she was done with intrigue, that much she knew.
“It’s just not worth it,” she shouted down at the running girl.
Jami didn’t hear her of course. What did this girl know of power and treachery, of betrayal and punishment? Nothing, and yet the silly mortal could master a legion simply by calling on The Name. It galled her! It was so wrong! Why did Heaven’s King care so much for these petty beings, who dried up and died like the autumn leaves of this cold and ugly land? Even this girl, in the springtime of her youth, had less beauty than the lowliest angel. Sometimes, she thought, the King of Heaven must lack any sense of aesthetics.
“Christopher,” Jami kept shouting for her brother as she ran, even though she knew he was probably out of earshot. “Duke? Christopher!”
As she turned the last corner, she caught sight of the streetlight marking the intersection with the boulevard below, and the warm glow of the light made her feel a little less twitchy. But now she had to decide, straight or go right? She could go left, too, but she knew he’d never have gone that way; it led right into the collection of strip malls that passed for the town center.
“Show me which way to go, Lord,” she whispered towards the heavens. Then she stopped to catch her breath, and touched the yellow-and-black Dead End sign that was her talisman for a run finished, her personal punctuation mark for completing yet another four-mile circuit of Lake Johanna.
She’d run a little harder than she’d meant to, and it was hard to hear anything but the wind over the sound of her own breathing. For a second, she thought she might have heard something in the distance, and she held her breath, listening intently. But there was nothing but silence, and she exhaled deeply, then started to cough. Running in the cold always made her cough; she didn’t know why, but she hated it. At least it wasn’t cold enough to freeze her eyelashes the way they did in January.
Just as she stopped coughing, she heard a dog bark somewhere ahead of her. Another dog answered it, and then a third, but as Jami listened to the three dogs, she realized that the first dog sounded angry, or maybe scared. The other two were just yapping, she was pretty sure, but there was something different about the way the first dog was barking.
“That’s Duke,” she told herself. “Maybe it’s Duke. Only one way to find out.”
She couldn’t help feeling annoyed, though, as she ran up the hill in the center of the road. The boulevard was nicely and brightly lit, while Sims Court was even darker and woodier and scarier than her own street. She remembered her first Halloween, and how they’d been forbidden to cross the boulevard to trick-or-treat on the other side. The houses were older there, and smaller, and she remembered Christopher telling her once that the older boys who lived in that neighborhood liked to hide in the bushes and leap out shrieking at little kids passing by, scaring them half to death.
The barking grew louder as she approached the top of the hill, and just as the road flattened out, she spotted the barking dog despite the darkness. She couldn’t see it very well and she was facing its backside, but she could see it was white and she was almost sure it was the family Brittany.
“Duke?” she called, but the dog ignored her, and continued to bark threateningly at something on the other side of her.
There was no sign of Christopher, at first, but as she ran closer, she saw that Duke was standing in front of someone lying face down in the half-melted snow. Her heart froze at the sight, because whoever it was was wearing a blue jacket that looked a lot like the jacket Mom had bought Christopher at The Gap.
“No, no,” she cried, but as she ran towards him, something looked odd about the way he was crumpled on the ground. It wasn’t until she was right next to him that she realized he was lying on top of someone else wearing dark clothes and dress-up shoes.
“Christopher, Christopher, are you okay?” she hissed at him as she felt about his neck for a pulse.
She felt a little better when she realized that he was okay, as far as she could tell. He was warm and breathing, in fact, if he hadn’t been lying right on top of an unconscious stranger in a pile of snow in the middle of the night, she might have thought he was just sleeping. Okay, sleeping a little soundly, maybe but still, sleeping was alive, so that was good. But what had happened to him?
She rolled him carefully off the stranger and onto his back, and laid him beside what she now saw was a grown man, a black guy who looked as if he was around her Dad’s age, or maybe a little younger. He looked like he was sleeping too, except for one thing, she realized as she leaned over the guy to take a closer look. His chest, unlike her brother’s, wasn’t moving. She could hear Christopher breathing steadily, but this man, whoever he was, didn’t seem to be.
“Oh… my… God….” Jami said unthinkingly, trying very hard not to panic.
She fell to her knees next to the man and placed her hand on his throat, and then his chest. She couldn’t feel anything, but he was still warm, so she wasn’t sure if that meant he was dead already or not. Was he having a heart attack, or was it already too late to do anything for him? She glanced up at the closest house and seeing the flickering blue light of a live television screen
through a window, thought for a second about running there to call 911. This man needed help, there was no question about that.
But there wasn’t time to go for help, she realized. The hospital was about ten minutes from here, and she was no doctor, but she was pretty sure this guy wasn’t going to last that long, if he wasn’t already dead. The only help he would get would have to come from her.
Now she bitterly regretted that day in September when she, Angie, and Ann Marie skipped out of health class on the day the paramedics came in to teach CPR. Why shouldn’t we blow it off, she remembered thinking at the time. It’s not like I’m ever going to use it, after all. She shook her head, furious with herself at the thought of how she’d laughed as Angie had dismissed Ann Marie’s objections.
“But, what if I, like, run into someone who’s, I don’t know, drowning or something like that?” the curly-haired girl had asked, actually sounding a little concerned about the possibility.
“I don’t know, I guess they’ll, like, die!” Angie said, grinning wickedly.
What were the chances, after all? They’d all laughed at Angie’s oh-so-funny heartlessness, then spent the afternoon wandering along the paths that meandered through the hills behind their school.
Looking down at the face of the dying man, Jami suddenly didn’t find the whole thing so hilarious anymore. It wasn’t just unfair, it was stupid; this poor guy might actually die because she was a selfish idiot who blew off class one day.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she told the man. “I really am. If I knew what to do, I’d do it. I swear!”
Well, she knew one thing, at least. On ER, the first thing they did when someone was having a heart attack was to rip off their shirt. Jami took a deep breath and straddled the man’s body, then quickly unbuttoned the wool overcoat and the button-down shirt underneath it. His chest was smooth and more muscular than she’d thought it would be—he must lift weights or something, she guessed—but his heart was definitely not beating.
