03 Before The Devil Knows You're Dead-Speak Of The Devil

by Eimer, Patricia

  “Do you really think now is the time?” he asked. “With the reapers and the lunatics outside and the rioting going on and all?”

  “Can you think of any better way to meet the end of life as we may know it?” I wrapped my fingers around the back of his head and urged him down to kiss me, running my free hand down his back.

  “No.” He pulled my shift off over my head and lifted me up onto the desk before he undid my bra. “If I have to spend a way choosing how to spend the last of my time on Earth, there isn’t anyone else I’d rather spend it with.”

  “I love you.” I kissed him again before I tilted my head to the side and nibbled on his neck.

  “I love you, too, Faith Anne Bettincourt.”

  “Soon to be Andrews,” I said and laced our fingers together.

  “Right.” He smiled against my mouth and kissed me again, pressing his hips against mine. “Mrs. Andrews. Mrs. Matt Andrews. My better half. My wife. My—”

  “Oh in my own name will you two shut up?” J asked.

  Matt jerked away from me and shifted around to face the phase window. I hid behind him and peered over his shoulder at my cousin, standing in the doorway to the exhibit hall. “You love him. He loves you. Smooch, smooch, kissy-kiss, snuggle, snuggle. I am going to barf if you two don’t knock it off.”

  “Sorry?” I said, hiding behind Matt’s back so my cousin couldn’t see my breasts and snatched up my shirt. I pulled it on and didn’t meet my cousin’s eyes.

  “There is nothing more ridiculous than listening to lovebirds chatter at each other—and people wonder why I stay single. We’re in the middle of a situation, and where do I find the two of you? Making out.”

  “Was there something you needed?” Matt asked.

  “Something I needed? No, why would I need something?” Jesus threw his hands up again. “We’re in the middle of an insurrection by a group of Celestial Beings. Why would I need anything? We’ve—Well, we’ve got news about someone we couldn’t locate before. Someone we thought might be helpful. Matt, I hate to tell you this but your dad—”

  “My dad? What about my dad? Did you find him?” Matt’s voice was anxious. “Oh shit he’s not a part of this, is he? Please tell me he’s not a part of this.”

  “Matt.” J’s voice dropped low and he crossed his arms over his chest. “Your dad is missing.”

  “What?” Matt asked. “What do you mean Dad’s missing? His fucking followers are taking part in a goddamn insurrection against God. He can’t be AWOL now of all times.”

  “He was at the hospital,” J said, his voice tense. “From what we could hear, he showed up during the initial battle at Rogers Hospital, when Michael and Brenda’s army tried to attack Faith and Malachi.”

  “No.” I shook my head. “If Bassano had attacked us, I would have seen him.”

  “He wasn’t with the army,” J said and I felt Matt’s shoulders tense. “From what we can figure out he was fighting with the demon legion. He was there with Malachi’s men.”

  “What was he doing with Malachi’s legion?” I asked.

  “Trying to defend you,” Matt said, his voice tight with tension. “He went there to help protect you.”

  “He—”

  “He would have wanted to protect you,” Matt said. “He liked you.”

  “Faith,” Harold called out. “Malachi’s on his way back. He says he needs you.”

  “Why?”

  “He didn’t say. Just that he needed all three of you the minute he got back. It sounded serious.”

  “Okay.” I leaned down to kiss Matt again. “We’ll figure out how to get your Dad when this is all over. Go save the world now.”

  “Faith—” J’s voice sounded as battered as I felt.

  “We’ll find him,” I said.

  “Either way, please be safe,” Matt said before he kissed my forehead. Then, he clambered through the phase portal and back to his side of the window. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too.”

  “Harold,” J said as he released the bonds of the portal and the window began to shrink between us. “You can touch the spear. Get it. Hide it. Don’t let anyone else near it.”

  “Got it, big man.” Harold gave J a quick salute.

  “Don’t fail me.” J’s voice was faint as the portal between us closed with a snap.

  “No pressure or anything,” Harold said, “only the chance of failing at a direct order from the Son of God himself. Why the hell didn’t I follow my mother’s advice and become a politician instead? It would have been so much easier.”

  “You’re much too good-looking to be a politician,” Aurelia said as she and Mary Beth came back onto the hall from checking on the others.

  “How are all the other floors doing?” I asked.

  “Okay. They’re scared but that’s to be expected. They want to know if we knew anything about who had attacked us,” Mary Beth said.

  “Militant right-wing vegans with an antitax agenda,” I said and felt silly even as I said it.

  “What?” Aurelia asked.

  “That’s what Tolliver told me to say. Pittsburgh was attacked by militant right-wing vegans who don’t believe in taxes.”

  “That’s so insane-sounding it’s almost plausible,” Mary Beth said. “So what are we supposed to do while they get the tree-hugging branch of the Tea Party under control?”

  “We wait.” Harold floated over to hover beside the spear. He let his hand linger for a moment and then swallowed. “Here goes nothing.” He closed his eyes, grabbed the spear, and pulled it free from the door handles.

  “Where are you going to hide it?” I asked.

  “The one place Michael will never have the sense to look.” Harold disappeared.

  “Where’s that?” Mary Beth asked.

  “I have no idea,” I answered. “I hope he knows what he’s doing.”

  Before she could answer, there was a pounding on the door and it flew open as Malachi and Phil staggered into the PICU lugging one very battered—but thankfully still living—angel between them.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  “Dad?” Mary Beth’s voice was high-pitched and shaky.

  “Hey, sweetheart. What are you doing here?” Bassano lifted his head and the gash that marred his face, running from below his right temple and down the edge of his jaw, was seeping blood. His left eye was black and other cuts and bruises littered all the exposed bits of his body. He coughed and the muscles in his chest quivered as he tried to breathe.

  “I’m helping Faith and Matt, you know, save the world and stuff.” Mary Beth hurried forward to help Malachi and Phil support her father’s weight while Aurelia grabbed a wheelchair and pulled it over to him. It was going to be much too small since it was built for a child, but right now it was the best we had.

  “That makes two of us, then.” Bassano coughed again and his chest convulsed. The two men managed to shift him into the chair and he hunched his shoulders, trying to fit. I caught a glimpse of the open gash down the length of his back and grimaced. Someone had gotten hold of him by the wing and tried to rip it off. It looked like they might have succeeded.

  Before I could ask any questions, Bassano held a hand out for me to come forward. “I hear you finally lost your mind and agreed to marry my son.”

  “Yeah.” My throat choked up as our fingers laced together. “I’m not sure who should congratulate whom, though.”

  “Why is that?” Bassano grinned at me. “Are you finally starting to realize what a catch your future father-in-law is?”

  “You’re supposed to be missing and possibly dead and you’re not looking too bad from where I’m standing. Even if you’re not the man of my dreams. So yay for me on getting engaged and yay for you on managing to kick enough ass to be around to give me shit about it.”

  Bassano snorted again and then coughed. Blood spattered over his hand and my stomach clenched. Whoever had gotten hold of him had done a number on his internal organs. “Please. There was no wa
y I was going to get ripped to pieces now.” He chuckled and I could hear the air whistling in his lungs, causing him to wheeze.

  “Why is that?” I asked.

  “I haven’t gotten my chance to kiss the bride. What sort of guy do you think is going to turn down finally getting the chance to kiss a girl like you? Death can wait for another time.”

  He puckered his lips together, batting his eyelashes, and I burst into hysterical giggles. The man was an unrepentant womanizer and even now, when he was badly injured, he was trying to flirt. With his son’s brand-new fiancé.

  “You stay alive till this is over and I promise, at the wedding, I’ll give you a kiss that will make your wings curl. Now let’s get you patched up. Then we can talk about kissing.”

  “Oooh,” Bassano said when I started to push him down the hall toward Room Three. “Naughty Nurses. How did you know that was my favorite game?”

  “Oh, shut it, Casanova.” I pushed his wheelchair through the door and parked it next to the bed. “Can you get up there on your own, or do I need to have Malachi and Phil help you?”

  Instead of answering, Bassano pushed himself up and tried to stand. His arms began to shake and his legs gave out before he managed to get upright. Malachi swooped in and hoisted the angel into his arms, cradling him like a baby.

  “Easy now.” Malachi gritted his teeth as he manhandled Bassano over to the bed and I knew his leg had to be hurting him. Mary Beth and Aurelia had managed to stop the bleeding but the wound hadn’t fully healed and the muscles had to be howling in pain by now, especially since he was picking up at least a hundred and eighty pounds of an angel’s dead weight.

  The dread demon laid the angel down in the bed.

  “Thank you,” Bassano said, his voice breathy. “The old legs aren’t feeling quite like they normally do, must have overdone it a bit. Not quite as young as I used to be it seems.”

  “What happened?” Phil Stavlinski asked, his voice sharp and professional. He didn’t understand that angels weren’t supposed to be injured, they weren’t supposed to have their mortal bodies destroyed, and we were lost facing an idea that all we had spent our lives believing was—quite simply—wrong.

  “Where do you want me to start?” Bassano asked. “With the moment Heaven and Hell split open and chaos exploded? Well, I had sat down and flipped on Old McDonald’s Internet Farm to harvest my cocaine plant so I could lure more prostitutes to work inside my online brothel that I’d set up in what was once my farmhouse—”

  “Excuse me?” Phil asked. His face held that sort of stunned—Oh my God there’s no such thing as Santa Claus but there are angels?—look that a lot of people got when they met Celestial Beings and realized they weren’t all quite as noble as they expected.

  “Old McDonald’s Internet Farm?” Bassano repeated. “It’s an online farming program you can play on MyWildLife.com?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Phil said.

  “Good, anyway, I’ve gotten to the stage that my farm is doing quite well in narco-agriculture and I diversified my interests. Now, on my little patch of Internet farmland, I have my plants, my processing facilities, an illegal army, two nightclubs full of naked entertainers, a hotel, a brothel, a casino, a money exchange, and a rehabilitation facility.”

  I looked up from the bloody arm I’d been inspecting. Forget finding out what had bitten him, because those were definitely teeth impressions around his left biceps, I had to make sure I’d heard him right. “You have a drug-rehab facility on a cocaine farm?”

  “Of course, it’s right next to the processing plant. They have an amazing return rate. Almost ninety percent of our customers return for another round of treatment within thirty days.”

  I started unbuttoning the front of his tattered, and now grimy, white button down shirt and opened it so I could see his chest. “You are horrible.”

  “Whatever. So, anyway, I was sitting down to harvest my Internet cocaine and all of a sudden there’s this explosion of light and all I could think was not again. I really don’t have time for this today.”

  “This?” Phil asked. “What is this?”

  “Another attempt to overthrow the Alpha and the Omega, of course. What do you think I’m talking about? Look, this has all happened before and it was a mess last time, a disaster of epic proportions. It was so big that it’s become part of your Judeo-Christian mythology.”

  “The war between Heaven and Hell,” Aurelia said. “The Fall of Lucifer.”

  “Right, where the angel Lucifer falls and becomes Satan.” Phil nodded.

  “The thing is, that’s not what happened,” Bassano said. “Faith’s dad was never an angel. So, what you see as a war between good and evil was more of a failed coup attempt by a couple of rogue angels.”

  “There was a bit more to it than that,” Aurelia said, her eyes glowing as she stared down my dread demon. “More innocent lives ruined that are never talked about.”

  “That’s not important right now,” Malachi answered. “Our relationship is not an issue right now.”

  “We are never an issue where you’re concerned.”

  “Shut up, both of you,” Bassano said. “That was the one bonus to the whole locking of Heaven and Hell away from each other, if you want my opinion—the blessed silence that reigned once we all no longer had to listen to the two of you bickering.”

  I smiled at my soon-to-be father-in-law and then grabbed the edge of his tattered shirt, intending to pull it off his back. He beat me to it, though, and stiffly lifted the hem, pulling it off him with a barely suppressed moan.

  Bassano’s back was revealed and I couldn’t help my own hiss of misplaced solidarity as I saw the two long, identical tears down the length of his shoulder blades. They looked deep, and when I pressed against the skin next to the wound, I couldn’t feel a wing shifting around underneath.

  “They’re gone,” Bassano said his voice cold. “Don’t bother trying to figure out what’s left to save. They’re gone, and there’s nothing to be done for it. Blondie got a good grip on me and the flappers didn’t stand a chance.”

  “Who?” Malachi asked. “Who did this to you?”

  “Who do you think? Who is it always?” Bassano asked and I could hear the worry inside his voice.

  “Damn it,” Malachi roared.

  “Mal?”

  The raging dread demon was stomping around the room and pulling at his hair.

  Instead of answering, he stormed over to the wall and punched it so hard that the drywall gave way beneath him. He grabbed the door and threw it open before storming out of the room.

  “The first time the gates between the realms opened and the angels reigned down upon man, they sought to free themselves from the Alpha’s rule.” Aurelia’s voice was quiet and vague, almost like she was reading from a particularly interesting article in a newspaper or something.

  “How?”

  “They wanted to rule the world themselves, send your father and your uncle back to where they came from.”

  “No way. Dad and the Alpha don’t remember anything about where they come from. They’ve said that before this realm, everything is darkness. Nothing.” I stared at her.

  “No, they told you that they don’t remember. That doesn’t mean they aren’t lying. They’re parents, remember? Lying is their prerogative if they think it will keep you safe,” Bassano said. “They remember a place before this realm and they had seen what absolute power over another civilization could do.

  “They vowed to never allow it to happen again. They refused to watch as power corrupted a realm in their control. So they decided that to maintain the balance of power they would keep the realms of man and the realms of immortals separate.”

  Bassano pulled my hand off his shoulder and dragged me around to stand in front of him. I sat on the bed beside him and started to inspect the wounds along his chest, including the long gash along his side, waiting for him to finish.

  “Once upon a much crappier time, Michael got
lucky and figured out how to open the barrier between the realms and angels poured into the land of men seeking to break from Heaven and rule as they would.”

  “What’s that have to do with now?” Phil asked

  Bassano looked up at him and gave the other man a slow once over. “You’re a soldier, aren’t you?”

  “Yes. Why?”

  “When men surrender en masse there are always some who believe that they should have fought longer. Men who believe they should have died fighting rather than bend their knee to a conqueror. Dangerous men,” Bassano said.

  “Fanatics. Adrenaline-addicted nut jobs. So?” Phil asked.

  “Angels aren’t all that different from men,” Bassano said. “Some believed we should have fought longer. The Alpha accepted them home like naughty children, but, as punishment, He forced them to become the angelic contingent of the reapers—angels who could see the world of men but were tightly controlled every time they tried to touch it.”

  “They can’t touch someone without killing them,” I said.

  “Exactly,” Bassano said. “Then, once He’d punished them, He sealed the realms. And while some of us may slip through to visit, reapers are banned from coming to Earth unless they’re on a pickup. Their visits to the mortal realm are strictly controlled. Or they were supposed to be, except Valentin wasn’t what you’d call the most vigilant of jailers.”

  “Is that what happened to you?” I asked Aurelia. “You tried to overthrow God, and they locked you in Purgatory as my assistant?”

  “I didn’t try to overthrow anyone,” she said sadly. “I only wanted my husband. When they locked the realms, he was on one side and I was on the other. I didn’t want anyone to die. I wanted my husband back.”

  “People died because of you,” I said.

  “No,” Bassano said. “No one died because of her. She never fought. All she did was ask to be placed in the one place where he could find her. The one place they could both be together. She gave up Heaven for him and—”

  “He chose his duty instead,” Aurelia said, her voice bitter. “He chose to stay on his side of the wall.”

  I swallowed as I stared at the tormented angel in front of me. She’d given up everything for love and it had all fallen apart anyway. They’d been doomed just like the rest of us were. Just like Matt and I might be if we didn’t find a way to stop Michael and prevent the End of Days from kicking off.