The Prison of the Angels (The Book of the Watchers 3)

by Janine Ashbless

  I shrugged. I had to tuck my hands in my lap so that the two men couldn’t see them tremble.

  “You see what a danger she presents? Not just to you, but to us all?”

  “She’s not wrong though, is she?”

  “She is on his side. Can you not see that?”

  “She is on the side of peace.”

  “How do sheep make peace with a wolf? And what is his interest in you, Miss Petak? Is he still your incubus?”

  That was a path I didn’t want him heading down. It would put me right back in the role of sacrificial lamb. “No,” I said flatly.

  “No,” Egan echoed, almost speaking over me. “He forswore her when she killed Veisi.”

  Technically true. Mentalis restricto. Oh you bad man, Egan. That’s why you wanted to bring me here, wasn’t it? So that I can do your lying for you?

  “I’ve not seen him since,” I said, obliging.

  “That was extraordinarily merciful of him.”

  “So you admit he has his good side?”

  Don Giuseppe snorted almost inaudibly. “Now tell me how, in the event of a negotiation, you plan to make him listen, if you are no longer opening your legs for him?”

  “We can get the Angel of the Written Word to listen,” Egan put in hastily, before I could answer. “She is the moderate influence, we believe. He will listen to her.”

  He pressed his fingers, exactly evenly spaced, on the desk edge, studying his nails. “Well. I think this interview is over.”

  Egan let out a breath.

  “What are you going to do?” I demanded, far more brash.

  “I will take it to the council, Miss Petak. And we will pray upon our decision.”

  “Grazie mille, Padre,” Egan murmured. “Milja…”

  I took the touch on my shoulder as a hint and stood to go. I couldn’t bring myself to thank the old cleric.

  “Riguardati, my son. And Miss Petak, we will be watching you. You are not yet an ally.”

  I nodded.

  “Nor are you currently an enemy. You took offense at many of the intimate questions I asked Father Egan, but they were necessary. Think about it and you will understand. We cannot open the door to the time of the Nephilim anew—the wars and the tyrannies. Mankind cannot survive the likes of Gilgamesh and Alexander and Hong Xiuquan again, not in a world with nuclear weapons. So we are vigilant, always, for the conception of such creatures. That is why we watched over you, after all.”

  I stared, my mouth open, but didn’t answer. Something awful was welling up from the depths of my memory, and I didn’t dare look at it. I just let Egan guide me out of the room with a hand on my arm. The door creaked shut behind us.

  “Ah well, that could have gone worse,” Egan muttered as we descended the huge staircase. “Sure, it could have gone a lot better too. Did you have to be quite so antagonistic there, Milja?”

  I planted my feet and braked us both to a halt halfway down the flight. My skin was jumping like there were insects crawling beneath it. “Do you know what men like him did to my people during the Second World War, Egan?”

  “What?”

  “I mean priests—Catholic priests, and Catholic politicians, and good Catholic believers, in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia? They sided with the Nazi occupiers and they rounded up the Orthodox Serbs and they took them to the death camps to be butchered. Hundreds of thousands of people just like me. Did you know that?”

  Egan looked aghast. “No. I didn’t. I didn’t know.”

  “I thought you found out all about my family history?”

  “Not that. I should have—I’m sorry.”

  “And here he is in this goddamn palace full of goddamn treasure and he is so goddamn smug that I don’t even know what—” I broke off. Egan put a hand out to my shoulder but I pulled away.

  “Milja—”

  “Don’t.”

  He pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes. “Does that—is that what you think of me too?”

  “No.” I couldn’t look at him properly. “Of course not. I mean…” I don’t think so. “Oh—it’s just this place! It’s supposed to be about God, but I’ve never been anywhere so materialistic! So goddamn devoted to the World and to Power! You are more likely to find God in the Trump Tower or the Waldorf than here.” I flung down my hands, shaking my head. “I need to go out,” I finished, weakly.

  “Okay, fine.”

  “I want to walk.”

  “Right so, I’ll come with you.”

  “No. I need to be on my own.” I made a move to start descending again.

  He clattered down the polished steps to block my path. “It’s not a great idea, Milja. Rome’s not always nice for women tourists on their own.”

  “What? It’s more dangerous than Boston, is it? Or Chicago?”

  He pulled a face. “I guess not. But you don’t speak the language.”

  “I’ll manage. I just need some time out.”

  He bit his lip, obviously hating the idea. “If you’re sure. But please be careful, Milja… And if any woman with a baby approaches you, she’s a pickpocket.”

  I slapped my empty jacket pockets. “Egan, I haven’t got anything left worth taking.”

  5

  DEVOTIONS OF ECSTASY

  I walked the rest of the afternoon away. Out of Vatican City, across the river on the Ponte Regina Margherita, then through the Piazza del Popolo, another discomfortingly vast open space. I ate street food; roasted chestnuts and deep fried artichokes which had just come into season. It was too cold to find the displays of fancy gelatos tempting. I noted hundreds of public statues and stared at many elaborately carved doorways, and let myself be bemused by the SPQR legend stamped on the sewer grates. I was well north of the famous ancient sites of the city here—the Forum and the Colosseum and so forth. This was the Baroque Rome, reinvented yet again by its people on foundations of earlier genius. It was bustling and rather beautiful and full of peculiar detail, as such old places are, and nothing like either the cities I was used to in America, or the little mountain village where I’d grown up. From the piazza, I could see all the way down the Via del Corso to the unreal Olympus of the Victor Emmanuel Monument—a faux-classical white building of unbelievable scale at the heart of the city. But here in the center of the cobbled space, at the foot of a tall Egyptian obelisk, there were four fountains in the shape of lions crouched upon stepped pyramids. They reminded me of my dream so sharply that they made me shiver.

  I bought a clear plastic poncho when it started to rain lightly.

  I didn’t get my pocket picked. The only time I ran into anything that remotely looked like trouble was while I was taking a turn around the formal gardens of the Villa Borghese, when a man stepped out from under a tree with a focused glint in his eye and a swaggering, “Ciao bella!”

  Then he stopped dead, his eyes widened, and he turned away hurriedly and retreated. It took me a moment to realize that it wasn’t anything about me personally that had scared him off, and then I looked quickly behind me. I anticipated spotting Egan looking bullish, but there was no one in sight. Only, on the path between the lawns, a last swirl of black smoke hovered for a second before it dispersed.

  My heart bumped in recognition. I pulled a face at the empty air—half acknowledgment, half wince.

  My walking wasn’t entirely aimless. I did have an end-goal in mind: Bernini’s carving of The Ecstasy of St. Teresa in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria. After I’d first become involved with Azazel, I’d looked up everything I could online about women having love affairs with angels, and very quickly Teresa’s name had come up. A cloistered nun of the sixteenth century, she’d spent years enjoying spiritual visions in which a beautiful angel appeared to her and inflicted orgasmic ecstasies of pleasure and tears. To me as a reader it was obvious that the sickly nun in the monastery in Avila had been under the influence of a Watcher imprisoned nearby.

  As I sat in a café, I pulled up a quote from her autobiography on my phone.
<
br />   ‘I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the iron’s point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it. The soul is satisfied now with nothing less than God.’

  I wanted to see the famous sculpture of this incident.

  Santa Maria della Vittoria was a small church on the Via XX Settembre, no more remarkable from the outside than any of the historical churches that crowded the streets of Rome. Its pale marble façade fronted a more pragmatic red-rendered structure. I got there a few minutes before six, when according to my online guidebook the church should still have been open, but I could see no light leaking from the few tiny windows onto the darkening winter streets. Rain had set in heavily now. Climbing the steps, I pushed at the door and it opened, directly onto the nave.

  For a moment my eyes were confused. A wild jumble of polychrome stone, white marble, fresco and gilding seemed to deliberately refuse any sort of visual sense; the one thing that drew focus was the huge golden cloudburst behind the altar, like a single movie frame of a heavenly explosion. Lighting was minimal and I had to make my preternatural eyes adjust. I tilted back my head and saw half-naked plaster angels clinging like white bats to the arches, and a painted ceiling on which the Virgin Mary presided over what looked like the fall of men and serpents from the celestial realm.

  War in Heaven. Does it never stop?

  I looked away, dropping my gaze. I didn’t much approve of pews in a church, but at least these ones were plain and did not hurt the eyes. A lone figure sat right at the front, his head resting against his hand in a dejected sideways slump.

  I shook off my rain-cape and peered around. It’s like scrambled egg, I thought, curling my lip at all the visual confusion. Or an explosion in a paint factory. How can anyone hear the Still Small Voice in here?

  Bernini’s sculpture was supposedly in one of the side chapels so I walked up the center aisle, looking from side to side. It wasn’t a big church at all. My gaze flicked over the seated figure. With his silvery hair and his gray suit he looked naggingly familiar, even though his hand hid his face. He didn’t shift an inch.

  Uncomfortably familiar.

  I stopped a few paces away. Goddamn. “Hello, Uriel.”

  Uriel dropped his hand and looked around with an expression of naked dismay. Then he launched himself to his feet and disappeared in crash of silver light.

  Well, that wasn’t what I’d expected. The archangel’s sudden departure left me open-mouthed. If he hadn’t been waiting to waylay me, what had he been here for at all? He was strictly Old Testament in allegiance, so far as I knew, and had little but contempt for Pauline Christianity.

  I looked around me but the church was silent and nothing had changed. I walked up and looked at the pew where he’d been sitting. From that position, I discovered, he had a pretty good line of sight across the aisle and the apse to the very Bernini sculpture I’d come looking for. Yes, there it was; staged just like a scene from a theatrical production. To either side, sculpted in snowy marble, sat male members of the patron’s family in their boxes, watching with animated fascination. On the central plinth, framed by jewel-colored pillars, the youthful seraph hovered over a collapsed and voluptuously disheveled Teresa, poised to stab her again with his golden dart. His face bore an enigmatic smile that looked positively cruel from this angle; hers was slack with orgasmic transport.

  That’s one hell of a spiritual moment she’s having. In front of witnesses, no less.

  “What the hell, Uriel?” I said out loud, rankled by my confusion and distracted from my goal. “What’s the point of stalking me if you haven’t got the guts to stick around?”

  My voice echoed in the empty church. I squared my shoulders.

  “Are you embarrassed your little plot with Roshana fell apart?”

  There was a draft against my neck as Uriel reappeared behind me. “Not in here!” he rasped. His blue eyes crackled with electricity and for once he did not look urbane or superior.

  “Huh.” I grinned. Of course the thing with churches is that everything said in them can be heard by all the Host of Heaven. “That’s some real dirty linen you’ve got there, Mr. Lightbringer. Don’t want to wash it in public, do you?”

  “Are you spoiling for a fight, Milja?”

  Yes. Yes I am. I couldn’t fight Father Giuseppe, or Egan, or Azazel. So Uriel would do. And he couldn’t hurt me, not by the divine rules he adhered to so loyally. “Are you going to fess up, or do you just want me to stand here and speculate out loud?”

  “Not here,” he snarled.

  “Okay. Let’s take it outside.” I remembered the rain. “Tell you what—if you play nice and don’t try any tricks or traps, I’ll let you take me back to my hotel.”

  He clenched his fists. Uriel was notably bad at controlling his facial expressions when in human form—unlike us mortals he’d never grown up with a teacher telling him off for rolling his eyes in boredom, and never had to face down a pack of ten-year-old bullies with fake aplomb. He hadn’t even spent time in any sexual relationships with humans like the Fallen had, so he’d never learned to guard his thoughts. Right now he looked nervous and ashamed. It didn’t sit well with his handsome silver fox shtick. “Fine,” he grunted. He reached out one elegant hand and grasped me by the shoulder.

  For a moment I was nowhere.

  We appeared somewhere I didn’t recognize. If it hadn’t been for my weird eyesight, I probably wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all. A single skylight thrummed with rain over a room full of boxes and dust. Lightning stuttered, faintly strobing the corners.

  Uriel shifted his hand to cup my cheek. “You should really consider before you provoke me too far,” he said with silky politesse. “You have no protector now.”

  “You think?” I answered, remembering the swirl of darkness in the garden.

  The archangel laughed, short and sharp, but he let go of me. “That didn’t take long then. Why am I not surprised? The call of the quim, eh?” He stalked off to lean against a beam. Now that he was out of immediate heavenly scrutiny, he relaxed somewhat and straightened his shoulders. The flicker of lightning turned his gray hair to a white halo.

  “Where is this?” I demanded.

  “The hotel attic.” Uriel gestured at the end of the room and a narrow door flung itself open, admitting the faint illumination of a stairwell bulb. “Don’t worry; you’re not even locked in.”

  Okay. He seemed to have kept his promise, and I eyed him with a little less mistrust. “I should have given you more credit,” I said. “You’re way more devious than the Boatman, aren’t you?”

  “The Boatman?”

  “Denim shirt. Stomps dragons. Commands the Host.” I couldn’t use Michael’s name in case he overheard.

  “Ah. The Pillar of the West,” he corrected me, with heavy disdain. “Well, we all have our talents. His is hitting things, mostly.”

  “I’ve had a few weeks to think about it. Haven’t really been able to think about anything else, to be honest. Ethiopia was no coincidence, was it?”

  “Hh.” He brushed cobwebs off his cuffs.

  “I mean, it makes sense that Roshana used that art exhibition and that particular copy of The Book of Enoch as bait for…my boyfriend. It’s sort of obvious now I look back on it. She practically pointed me at the clue we needed.” I’d been kicking myself for so long now that the bruises were numb. “And he couldn’t resist finding out more, could he? Not if it offered the way to free his old, old friend. So poor li’l orphan Roshana got to meet her daddy at last, as an ally. And she used me to make the introductions; she was quite open about that. Which also makes sense, because it’s not as if she knew how he’d react to her, was it? If she’d jus
t popped up out of nowhere, he could have… Well, he could have chosen to eliminate the risk she represented.”

  Uriel bit his upper lip, eyes narrowed.

  “But the thing is… How did she know where the Bookworm was? And how did she know who I was? I guess she could have had an enormous network of international informants. She was old and pretty rich. But she wasn’t Vidimus. How did she even know that her father was free, unless someone told her?”

  I could see his unblinking eyes in the shadows, glowing blue.

  “I think you told her.”

  Uriel cleared his throat, and smiled. “My, you have been exercising the old gray matter.”

  “Am I right?”

  He only smiled. But he looked uncomfortable.

  I’d spent so long wanting to shriek accusations, but it just came out flat and hard. “I think you set the whole thing up. The attack on Lalibela. The fight with Saint George. Roshana imprisoning her father. Was that her ambition from the beginning?”

  He shrugged one Armani-clad shoulder. “Who knows the mysteries of the human heart? I might have pointed out certain options to her. She didn’t confide in me much.”

  “And you—You were prepared to risk freeing the Bookworm, just to get him?”

  He hesitated. “She’s no warrior.”

  “What makes it super-creepy is that you were in conspiracy with one of the Nephilim, and could have ended up making her immortal. Yet your job is supposed to be to eliminate them.”

  “She died, didn’t she? Well done, by the way.”

  “That doesn’t let you off the hook. No wonder you don’t want me mouthing off in church—that’d look really bad in front of the others. You disobeyed orders. Divine orders.”

  Uriel held up a warning finger and almost tripped over his words; “That’s not true. She was a tool used to a greater end. The Scapegoat needed to be imprisoned, and she was the means.”

  “Oh fine. What do they call that—Situation Ethics, isn’t it?”