Salvatore’s fists clenched tight and he gritted his teeth and tried to drag himself from the bed of trash, to pull himself up from the filth in which he was mired, to regain his stature.
“No,” he said out loud, perhaps to himself and perhaps, he thought, to the demon sharing his flesh. “No, this is not the work of the Lord. This I will not do!”
He knew he was talking to the demon now. “I resist you!” he yelled, his voice hoarse and muffled by the stinging winter winds. And for a moment, he waited, as though he might hear the demon’s voice in reply.
After a few seconds, he did.
A few seconds beyond that, Salvatore Cortina died. His corpse lay motionless and ruined amidst the trash in the alleyway, slowly collecting a fine layer of snow and ice as the body cooled. His soul passed on to the Realms of Shadow.
Salvatore’s vision settled warily on the impossible landscape of a realm outside existence. It was a black place, not from pigments in the soil or shadows cast by distant radiance, but from the lack of it. It was the ash from fires long dead, from light that had failed to fall and objects that had not ended their existence, but rather had never been in the first place, and Salvatore knew that his eyes did not see anything there. It was a place he could witness without human senses, for he had none. It was the domain of the unnamed, a realm of shadow, one of many, separate and unified at once.
It had a name, given it long ago.
Abaddon.
Salvatore moved carefully through the black, guided by the unwavering, invisible tug of the fallen angel that had passed into that place alongside him. He quaked as he sensed the presence of the unnamed–creatures that had never come to exist. Creatures left to rot in the black that hungered mightily for form. Shades, the demon called them. Salvatore averted his gaze from them and looked at the landscape instead, and blanched at the image of towering spires, gleaming black, curved and sharp as knives, fifty-feet tall and looming over the ashen terra firma, claws over cowering prey.
“It is not the domain of God,” came the demon’s voice, loud and resonate in this place, though without discernible source.
“It is Hell,” answered Salvatore, though he knew not how he produced sound or to whom exactly he was speaking.
“No,” said the demon. “It is nowhere.”
“Why are we here? Am I dead?”
“Yes,” said the demon. Its voice was a fading whisper. “We are here to see the Prince. Your frailty has cost us much and I fear he has no more patience.”
“Who are you?”
“Zamagiel.”
“Who is the Prince?”
“He is this place and everything in it.” A dust-black cyclone meandered across the horizon. Zamagiel added, “He owes me one last chance.”
“Why?”
“Because I once did him a favor. But if I fail again, I will remain here forever.”
“Forever?”
“Yes.”
“And I?”
“You are already here. You are dead.”
Salvatore thought on this for a moment. “How can you return without me? Don’t you need a body?”
There was a long, seemingly endless, silence, broken only by the distant whispering of cyclones traveling the horizon, and the much closer sound of claws click clacking in the shadows nearby.
“It is my body now. You have failed me. You have even obstructed my holy cause. I once believed that, together, we would restore the Garden and rid it of the sin and vice that had overtaken its soil. If the Prince grants my last wish, you will only accompany me as a necessity for the body’s functioning.”
“It is my body!”
“It is no longer yours to command. Unblessed, unsanctified, it belongs to the Prince now. It is his to do with as he would, until consecration or flame. The fact that you are needed to operate it is... an irritation.”
There was another long silence. Salvatore’s feet plodded through the swirling dust. He shielded himself as a howling vortex ripped past and through him. Then, he heard the demon’s voice for the very last time.
“How we return is left to the Prince to decide. I fear it will not be pleasant.”
20
TRENT HAD EXPECTED SOMETHING BIG, ostentatious and imposing. Instead, he stood before a medium-sized villa in Spanish adobe style. Vines adorned the arch-shaped entranceway, though most of them had all but blown off in the raging snowstorm. In their place, a thick layer of snow made the house look strange and foreboding, despite its small stature.
Unflinching, Trent passed through the arch and made his way past snow-buried gardens and frozen statuary. One that caught his eye looked like a Franciscan monk, hands together and head bowed in prayer. The snow had coated his bald pate, forming a white cone that made the statue look comical, like a white-capped yard gnome.
He made his way up the cobblestone path to an old-fashioned front door, made from weathered wood planks. Everything about the construction of the adobe home–the wooden door, the stonework, and the gardens–seemed natural and non-synthetic. It was unusual and a stark departure from the common pre-fab construction of the suburbs that dominated most of the city. Trent raised a frostbitten hand and banged on the door. It opened almost immediately, seemingly of its own accord.
“Come in, Trent,” intoned a voice that immediately struck chords of remembrance in his mind. The speaker’s identity rested on the tip of his tongue, like a word long forgotten.
Trent stepped inside and was greeted by an imposing amount of warmth from a blazing fireplace near the front entrance. In fact, nearly every room he could see from the foyer sported a beautiful stone fireplace, all of which were contributing heat to the dwelling. It wasn’t just warm in the mansion–it was almost hot. Trent figured that if Ramón was another demon, then that made perfect sense. He walked into the foyer and the door shut behind him, again of its own will.
“I’m in the kitchen. Let yourself in. I reckon we got some things to chat about.”
Trent was taken aback by both the matter-of-factness and the friendliness of the voice. He walked past the entranceway to a large room with a vaulted ceiling that apparently served as an indoor arbor of sorts. The center of the slate-tiled floor was broken by a large live oak that stretched to the zenith of the twenty-foot ceiling. Behind it was a fountain that poured down from the second story, obscuring one of the ubiquitous fireplaces. Steam drifted from the warmed water as it made its way via cracks in the floor to narrow channels that ran along the lengths of every wall. A set of cast-iron stairs near the entranceway led to the second floor, where Trent could see closed wooden doors, similar to the front door, all of which looked out over the great hall with the oak tree. Trent found himself transfixed.
The voice intoned again from the kitchen, somewhere around the corner of the arbor to Trent’s left. “I’m brewing some coffee. You want a cup?”
Trent muttered, “Sure.”
“I’m sorry?”
Trent realized that the sound of running water from the fountain probably made it hard to hear anyone speaking in the arbor. He proceeded forward past the tree and turned left into what he assumed would be the kitchen area. As he rounded the corner, he repeated himself, “Sure, I’ll have some coff–,” he stopped mid-sentence.
Standing only twenty feet away, retrieving coffee cups from a cabinet, was the man that Trent had seen so many times in so many nightmares since the airplane crash. He was dressed in tight blue jeans and had a brown belt that cinched them around a tucked-in, western-style blue dress shirt with a faint white flower print. His skin, tanned and leathery, bore many wrinkles, and his long black hair had developed quite a few strands of gray. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, showing off massive iron cross tattoos on both forearms.
It was definitely the man that Trent had seen in his dreams. It was the same man he had watched fall to his death, arms outstretched like a skydiver caught in a moment of absolute bliss. It was the same man whose body had saved Trent’s life. It was the ol
d Mexican.
He turned to face Trent, coffee cups in his hand. One was black and the other white. The Mexican smiled and shot Trent a brief wink.
“So you still remember me, huh?” He pulled the carafe from beneath the coffee maker and poured out one cup, then the other. As he watched the near-black liquid pour into the ceramic mugs, he added, without looking up, “And I see you stole my hat.”
Unconsciously, Trent reached up and touched the brim of the gray cowboy hat on his head.
Ramón chuckled and set the coffee carafe back in its place before turning to approach Trent with an outstretched arm holding a steaming mug.
“It’s alright. I don’t need it. Got a whole rack of hats upstairs.” He handed the mug to Trent, who took it without hesitation. “Besides, it looks good. Fits you nicely. I’ve always said that a hat judges a man, not the other way around. That one judges you just fine.”
Trent’s thoughts swam as he stood in the dining room of the strange Spanish-style mansion, taking coffee from a Mexican who both caused and prevented his death. Unable to think of any proper response, he lifted the coffee to his lips and took a sip.
“This coffee is really good,” he said, meaning every word. It was the best coffee he had ever tasted.
“Jamaican Blue Mountain,” Ramón replied. “Tried it once and never could go back to drinking anything else.” He shrugged. “Call me a snob, but it’s damn good.”
“Ramón,” Trent said, repeating the name over and over in his head.
“So they told you my name already,” Ramón took a long sip of his own drink. “That’s good. One less thing to explain.”
“Okay.”
Ramón laughed. “Look, son, just because every bone in my body wants me to kill you and fill the front fountain with your blood, now that don’t mean you have to act all shy. Loosen up a little.”
Trent blinked. The sentence was filled with such an odd mixture of friendly intentions and clear, horrifying malice.
“Besides, wouldn’t do me no good to kill you anyhow. Such as things are.”
Ramón started walking–limping, really–toward a small hallway that curved back around the arbor and fountain. He gestured for Trent to follow.
“Let the ice melt out of your boots and bring the coffee to the study. We got some things to discuss.”
Trent watched Ramón wander off beyond the gentle sounds of the fountain, toward a room in the back corner of the mansion. Trent surveyed his surroundings.
The kitchen was neat and clean, but clearly stocked for a sole resident. A bottle of imported Tequila stood on the countertop next to a vase of red and purple flowers and a green curvy glass bottle filled with olive oil and red peppers. The coffee machine was already brewing away, refilling its carafe – one of those automatic models that ground the beans and started the brew when it sensed an empty pot. On the far side of the kitchen was a glass door that looked out onto a stretch of empty desert, broken only by a set of stone furniture arranged around a stone table under an umbrella. The umbrella had blown over and lay twisted around the base of the table. Snow battered against the window, diving into the light from the darkness of the blizzard-ensconced desert. It seemed as if it was trying desperately to force its way inside, only to be denied by the glass.
Trent steeled himself and took a deep breath. He knew there would be more answers to be found here than he had even considered–answers about more than just the secret wars of angels and demons. There were answers here about himself.
The study was immaculate and sparsely furnished. The colors were simple, in light browns and oranges, with white stone-block walls and a bamboo floor. A painting of a white horse standing against a fiery sunset graced one wall and small wooden shelves holding flowerpots graced the opposite wall. Above Ramón’s large oak desk was a small window that looked out onto the snowstorm. In the corner near the doorway stood a modern floor lamp and next to it on the wall was a candelabra. The combination of the two left the room basking in a warm, quiet glow.
Trent carried his steaming coffee mug to the couch beneath the flowerpot shelf. He sat down and faced Ramón, who was sitting in his desk chair now, absently watching the snow rage outside. Trent ran his fingers over the couch. It was black and leathery, a strange sort of leather with numerous rough patches. Trent had never seen or felt anything quite like it.
Ramón broke the silence without turning to face the younger man. “So I suppose you want to know a lot of things. I suppose you’re just full of questions and probably a few worries, too. And this blizzard ain’t helping matters much. Am I right?”
“Yeah,” Trent answered.
“You think I can answer all your questions?” Ramón finally turned to look at the gambler. “You think I can smooth over all your worries? Tell you that things are gonna be okay?”
Trent scowled. “Tell me how to end all of this.”
“Right to the strategies and tactics, huh?” Ramón grinned. “Son, you got things to worry ‘bout now that I haven’t had to think on for a long time.” He paused and looked at the ceiling for a moment. “Well, at least it would be a long time to you, I guess. For me, it seems like yesterday.”
“The crash.”
“Good a place to start as any.”
“You didn’t die.”
“Now that’s not exactly a question, is it? Come on, Trent. Ask what you really want to know. There’s a question that’s been eating you from the inside.” He smiled and winked. “I’m the guy to ask.” He took a sip of his coffee and waited.
Ramón was right. Trent had been fighting the question every second of every day since the crash. It was a question he had seriously entertained only in the darkest hours of the night, only when Susan was safely asleep. It was a question that had kept him awake, a question that had given him nightmares.
“How did I survive that crash?”
Ramón took an excruciatingly long sip on his drink. “Well,” he answered, “in a way, you didn’t.”
Trent’s heart sank. He had always known the answer, and in the past hours it had grown in intensity, lingering at the back of every one of his thoughts. But he had always wanted it to be a lie. He was not sure exactly what the resolution of that question meant for him, but he suspected it didn’t mean good things. “What am I, then, some sort of zombie?”
Ramón chuckled. “Hell no, son. If you were one of them, I wouldn’t have let you through my front door. Even limping around like I do nowadays, I could still take a walking corpse.”
“Then what am I?”
“Well now, that’s a tougher question to answer. The better question would be to ask what I am.”
“What are you?”
“Glad you asked.” Ramón smiled. “I’m a fallen angel with a mortal soul–yours, to be specific.”
Trent choked on his coffee. Oddly, he mused, it wasn’t the angel part that had made him swallow the coffee down the wrong pipe.
“And you, my friend, are a man without one. But, see, that’s the problem.” He took another sip. “I’ve got something of yours, and you’ve got something of mine.”
“What?”
“I just told you.”
“But that doesn’t explain how I survived–”
“Me.” Ramón poked himself in the chest. “You survived because you fell on me. Thing is, when that happened, somehow–and frankly, I don’t know exactly how–but somehow, you took the essence of what made me an angel.”
“You mean a demon,” Trent corrected, knowing as he said it that he was making a serious conversational gaff.
Ramón waggled a finger and shook his head. “Now now. I’m all for calling a rose a rose, but falling out of the Lord’s favor–” He made the symbol of a cross in the air. Trent noticed that Ramón’s hands bore several silver rings, all adorned with strange symbols. “Falling out of the Lord’s favor didn’t give me any special talents, just a new office environment. I brought all my talents with me.”
“But now I have them,”
Trent offered. It was both a statement and a hesitant question.
“Not all, but some.” Ramón finished the coffee and set the mug aside on the desk.
He leaned forward in his chair, a few strands of long gray hair slipping from his ponytail to cascade down over his face. He clasped his hands together, fingers intertwined. Trent realized that Ramón’s eyes were beginning to glow a faint yellow and he couldn’t resist the temptation to see this creature in his true form. Ramón offered a handshake.
“Look at me, Trent. See what I really look like and understand one thing–”
Trent reached out, took the hand in his own, and saw the angel’s true form. It was horrific. Where two eyes had been there were now hundreds. Where there had been two arms, there were now a dozen, covered in scaly, jaundiced flesh, sporting a dozen broken wings of brown feathers. The creature’s body was twisted and malformed, and its jaws bore several rows of razor-pointed teeth that proceeded back into the blackness of its maw. This was no mere fallen angel–it was something far more powerful. In its yellow eyes burned a hatred that Trent could almost taste. The smell of ozone shot up Trent’s nostrils, forcing him to choke out loud.
Looking at Ramón in this way had given the creature’s voice a new tone. It was rough, guttural, and its jaws dripped with fluid as it barked out every word. “Understand that if I could, I would kill you right here, right now. I wouldn’t spare an inch of my mercy on your weak little existence. God delivered his wrath down on me thousands of years ago, and I would do likewise to you. Understand?”
Trent nodded, closed his eyes, and pulled the hand away. He could not stand to look upon Ramón’s true form any longer. The hideousness of it raised in him an ancient, primal fear. At least in human form, the old man was bearable to behold.
“Then why don’t you kill me?” Trent asked, weakly.
“Can’t.” Ramón leaned back in his chair and smiled with one corner of his mouth. Seen in human form again, his voice had regained its friendly, southwestern tone. “I said that you and me had some things to discuss. We’re four halves to two wholes, but we’re all mixed up. If I kill you, your soul turns me mortal. And I’ve lived way too long to be turning mortal now. You’d be lookin’ at a pile of dust in this chair.” He paused and then added, “Well, you wouldn’t, ‘cause you’d be dead.” He chuckled.
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