Nodding, Clive forced his lips into action. “How?”
The angel held out a hand. Resting on its palm was a crisp US dollar bill. Tentative, Clive reached out, ignoring the icy aura that drove needles through his fingers, fascinated by the play of blue light on his own imperfect flesh, and took the offering.
“This binds you to me, Clive. Rejoice at that.” Clive felt exultation shaft him, gathering at his suddenly straining penis. “On the design of that note is an eye, resting atop a pyramid. Press that symbol to your forehead, between your eyes and a little above, and think of me. I will come to you, and the hordes of Hell shall be baying at my back. There is not much time.”
Again, Clive felt the fear, and a suffocating hopelessness. Casting his arms wide in despair, he indicated the cell around him, its four walls more claustrophobic than ever. “I'll do it, I'll do anything,” he was desperate for his sincerity to strike home. “But how am I supposed to search while I'm locked away...”
The light coming from the angel soared in intensity, flashbulb bright, and Clive fell back, covering his eyes, waiting for the hard slap of the concrete floor.
When instead he felt the soft tickle of grass at his neck, he began to laugh. Somewhere, deep down where his critical self still lived, he knew it wasn't a healthy laugh. Pulling his hands from his eyes, he sat up, still giggling, and looked around.
Evening was falling on Kelvingrove Park, in the West End of the city. To his left, past where the park dipped down to the river Kelvin and back up to the road, Glasgow University's one hundred and twenty year old clock tower speared a finger at the setting sun. In summer, students crowded the grassy bank on which he lay, soaking in the sun while they grappled with philosophies, arts, and sciences. In another University, in another part of the world, he had once done the same. Another world. Another Clive Huntley. Things were different now.
There was nobody in sight, and the cold evening air told him why. Still giggling, absently wiping dribble from his chin, Clive climbed to his feet, the smell of his own sweat and urine hardly bothering him. Kelvingrove Park was big, but he was near to Hillhead Street, where he had once been neighbours with an angel. A very long time ago, so it felt. Staggering, unaware of the vacancy in his smile, he limped down the slope to the path, slipping the fresh dollar bill into his pocket as he went.
Not much time. Not much time to save an angel from Hell's screaming damned. Not much time to earn redemption for his crimes. Pulling in a lungful of fresh air, he knew he had been set a big challenge, but was sure he was up to the task.
Clive Huntley had a special destiny, and as he made his reeling way from the park towards the grumble of rush hour traffic, a walk he had made with his wife many times since coming to the city, that knowledge made him clutch at himself with glee.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ambrose went white, the strength draining from his legs and arms, and he wondered if he was going to vomit. There were those among his former colleagues, true hellspawn mostly, who delighted in vomiting almost every time they manifested to humans, but Ambrose had always found the tactic demeaning. Most of the fallen angels did. Now though, his stomach was telling him he might not have much choice.
Ignoring Calum's plea for information, he sat inelegantly down on the beaten wooden stool next to Pandora's bed, gazing at her in horrified wonder. Her long dark hair splayed across the pillow, and her full lips were pursed. Her fine eyebrows framed wide, extraordinary eyes. She was every inch the sleeping angel, lit by the cold light of the dying afternoon. Aloof, unattainable... except Ambrose had crossed that threshold and now she was his, as much as he was hers. It was such a strange, transforming passion, reshaping him moment by moment in ways that the steadfast, compassionate love he had known when he stood among the Heavenly Host never had. While that was enduring, consistent, this was a scourging fire.
Yet, for all that he loved her, she was more of a mystery to him than ever. How important could she be among the ranks of angels that God would send his greatest and mightiest to hunt her down? He thought back to that night, just three weeks previously, when he had escaped Leviathan, confessed his sins, and sought out Pandora. She was home, and she was not alone. Michael was there, torturing her to destruction, and the insanity in her eyes had hurt Ambrose in places he didn’t know he could still lay claim to. Michael. Archangel, commander of God’s armies, majestically powerful. Under ordinary circumstances, Ambrose would have been snuffed from existence.
Except, for the first time in thousands of years, he was without sin. No angel could harm a creature without sin, though Ambrose had never considered what might happen if they tried. That night he found out, as Michael went nuclear. He barely got his lover free from the wall Michael had pinned her too, barely reached the street, before the Archangel and the building exploded.
He shuddered. Leviathan and Michael were powerful beings, many links up the chain from he and Pandora. The creature that had appeared downstairs though, just metres away from where he had been watching over Pandora, was of a degree of magnitude greater even than those two. Tracing his fingers across her brow, he wished she would wake up, so that he could ask her what was going on.
He couldn't, because she wasn't asleep. As near as he could tell, she was in what human beings called a coma. It should be impossible for an angel to be in such a state. Certainly, no similar cases were recorded. Yet unconscious she remained, ever since he had pulled her from her flat.
What had Michael done to her? Piercing her delicate wings would have caused her agony at the time, but the wounds had healed. Physically, they should both be in good shape.
Except she wouldn't wake up.
Ambrose realised the priest had been silent for some time. Calum stood by the window, gazing out over the walled churchyard and the serpentine snarl of rush hour traffic queuing along the nearby road, chewing his lower lip. The young priest was not holding up well under his recent experiences, the cuts on his face and hands mirroring the slashing of his hopes and beliefs. Ambrose was half inclined to lie to him, delivering him peace of mind in part payment for the sanctuary he had offered them. Calum was an interesting character, one Ambrose would have taken a particular interest in only a short time ago. A man of the cloth, he nevertheless carried the weight of a corrupt youth around with him, ripe for the exploitation. It would take only a little work, some suggestion and cajoling, to have the priest cavorting through fields of debauchery. Even now, the temptation to meddle was almost overwhelming. The chuckle that fluttered past his lips caused the priest to turn, his lips white.
“Apologies,” Ambrose said. “Just meditating on old habits dying hard.” Calum twitched, and Ambrose wondered what he had inferred from that.
“Will you tell me what's going on?” The priest was persistent. Sighing, Ambrose looked around the room, at the uncovered, dusty floorboards, the white plastered walls flaking gently to dust, the moth-eaten curtains.
“Are you sure you want to know?” Calum opened his mouth to speak, and Ambrose shushed him with a finger. “Think about it. I could leave, take Pandora with me, abandon you to live your life in sweet ignorance. That's almost as good as bliss, so I'm given to understand.” Pausing, he watched Calum's face to see if his words were sinking in. “I'd be doing you a favour.”
Calum stared, and Ambrose realised what it meant for them if he had actually managed to talk sense into the man. Where would he and Pandora go? To his relief, the priest shook his head. “Tell me.”
Ambrose paused, knowing he was avoiding doing that very thing. “Close the curtains first. We had best keep them drawn from now on. Prying eyes, and so forth.” Calum nodded, pulling the coarse brown curtains to, throwing the room into shadow until he flicked the light switch. Above them, the bare bulb flickered to half-life. Lacking natural light, the room looked bleaker than ever. All the better for delivering harsh truths.
“Very well. You're right. That was no visitor from Hell. Not even Lucifer can walk on sanctified ground without suf
fering consequences like I did before you absolved me.” Guilt washed over Calum's face, and Ambrose realised something else was bothering the man. “In fact,” he continued, watching closely, “it gets worse the more powerful you are. You'd have worked that out by now, if you were thinking clearly. Sinners don't spontaneously combust when they cross the threshold every Sunday morning, do they? Only the extreme worst among humans can accumulate a fraction of the sin in one lifetime that an immortal demon can over millennia. So, they feel discomfort in church, maybe a little hot and bothered, but only rarely will they actually burn.” Calum nodded, some of his anxiety dissolving beneath the force of his intense curiosity. Doubtless he was thinking back to the few examples his fellow clergy might have mentioned of people bursting into flame in the pews. Were they urban myth, or reality? Ambrose knew they were a mixture of both. “I'm a fallen angel, who warred openly with God. When I step into these places, I burn like dry tinder. At least, that was the case until recently.” Again, that dark flush spread over Calum's cheeks, and he averted his eyes. Curious.
“It’s a question of scale,” he continued. “If the Lord Leviathan set foot past the church gate, there'd be an explosion, a big one, like Michael when he tried to take me.” Ambrose knew that Calum had been by the site of that encounter, and had seen the ruins of the tenements that so recently stood there. “Nobody knows what would happen if Lucifer tried it. I expect that not a lot of Glasgow would be left. If one of my former brethren had been stupid enough to manifest next to you inside a church, I'd be wiping you off whatever remained of the walls.”
Calum shuddered, his imagination obviously good. Ambrose paused to let him come to the natural conclusion. The man's posture told the story before his eyes filled up, his shoulders slumping as the size and scope of what was due him sank in. “That means...”
“Colloquially speaking, you're fucked.” It was better to be brutal and get whatever reactions were to come out of the way, but the priest rallied better than Ambrose expected.
“I don't believe that. If you can be absolved, why can't I?”
Ambrose looked down at Pandora's still face. “That's how it usually works. This time though, I think it's irreversible.”
“But why? I'll appeal to God Himself. I'll...”
Ambrose looked up at him. “You've come as close to God as you ever will. You've spoken to the Prince of the Countenance, highest among the handful of Archangels permitted to look at His own face. You've been condemned to damnation by Metatron, the little Yahweh, a creature so powerful that he's been mistaken for God Himself several times in your history. You weren't damned by a set of rules, to escape on a technicality, like I did. God does His dealings on this world through Metatron, His mouthpiece, and you might as well have been personally judged by the Almighty.”
Calum's eyes were wide, his pupils tiny, and he dropped to his knees. Ambrose was almost sorry to see it. Here was a tiny man, with a tiny life, who should have a myriad tiny hopes and troubles. Now he was a player in celestial events unlike anything Ambrose had heard of. All because he had followed his conscience. “I'm sorry, Calum.”
Calum's mouth flapped. “Sorry? Did you know?”
Ambrose didn't have to lie. “That it would come to this for you? I had no idea. Do you think it would have stopped me, if I had?” Calum's face creased in pain, and he shook his head. “I am what I am, Calum. To be honest, which is still a novel experience for me, I don't even know what that is anymore. I'm fighting my nature for her,” he indicated Pandora with a flick of his head. “I'm even getting somewhere. If you'll pardon the cliché though, I'm no angel. Not anymore.”
Calum's jaw clenched, and he pushed himself to his feet, eyes stabbing accusations. “I know. I know what you are. I know what you did, and I'm damned for it in turn.”
Ambrose pursed his lips. Now he would find out what else was bothering the priest. “I'm not entirely sure I follow you.” The note of polite confusion in his voice was feigned. Ambrose knew very well what was adding to the burden of Calum's guilt.
“Really? You were out last night.”
As he thought. “You could say that.” Truthfully, he had been more concerned with drowning his sorrows. Alcohol had a limited effect on him, but it was the better option to sitting staring at his comatose love for another fifteen hours of night. Leaving the church had been an enormous risk, but he had been unable to resist the temptation to thumb his nose at his pursuers one more time.
“You were at the student union up the road. I saw the papers this morning. The police want to talk to you, did you know? Your description is all over the press.” There was despair and anger in Calum's voice, floating over a current of violence that the priest would never admit to feeling. Had Ambrose been mortal and vulnerable, he did not think Calum would have been able to stop himself from venting his frustrations physically. Even now he was holding himself back like a dog on a leash. His legs were held, as though relaxing them would lead to stepping forward, to punching, and kicking, and biting.
Ambrose rolled his shoulders wearily, and rubbed a hand over his face. “That was a mistake, and not what you think. I did nothing wrong.”
“You did nothing wrong?” Calum was spitting now. “People died! Lots of people died!”
“People die every day. Death is not a crime. Malice is. Calum, I gave them a gift, and -”
“Gift!”
That was enough. Ambrose snapped, his rare temper flowing freely for the first time in decades. Standing, he let his true nature show. With his fingers crooking into yellow claws, he stretched out his wings, shredding his t-shirt in the process. Scarlet light played beneath the smooth skin of his face and torso, making him luminous as his eyes narrowed to crimson dots.
“Do not presume to judge me.”
Calum quailed, and that was enough to draw Ambrose back to himself. Between blinks the wings were gone, the fingers were slender and beautiful again, the eyes his normal, haunting brown.
“Calum,” he struggled to calm himself. “Calum, I'm sorry. You don't understand what it's like. I've been terrorising you people for so long.” To his surprise, he was distressed, his hitching breath hinting at tears barely suppressed.
Calum appeared to sense this, and stepped forward. After witnessing the spectacle of Metatron, Ambrose's little performance required little recovery time from the priest. How quickly humans adapted. “And is that what happened in the club, Ambrose? You couldn't resist?”
Ambrose shook his head. “No. I mean it. It wasn't like that. If I had sinned, would I be able to stay overnight in a church? I have no new crimes to confess, I promise you.” Sticking out his tongue, he waggled it for a moment. “Look, no fork.”
Calum almost smiled. “What happened then?”
“I tried something, a trick of angels. I wanted to see if I could still do it.” In Ambrose's head, the dancers were collapsing around him again, dropping to the floor as hearts imploded and nervous systems shorted out. “I gave them rapture. It's a spiritual, physical joy, the most intense sensation it's possible to experience outside of Heaven. In the old days, angels used to let exceptional humans experience it - saints, prophets, and so on.”
Calum's face was despairing. “But these people died.”
“They did. It took me by surprise, I have to admit. Your kind, men and women, just can't process joy anymore, not real joy. You're inured to it. The moments of joy in your lives are pale shadows of the real thing, and by injecting them with something pure, I overloaded their systems. It was a mistake. An honest one.” Smiling at the irony, he tried to analyse how Calum was feeling. Just dipping a mental finger into the man's emotional centre, he could feel the twisting currents writhing there.
“All right.” Calum sighed, and some of the tension left him. “All right, a mistake. I'm still responsible though. It still wouldn't have happened without me.”
“What else can they do to you? Having already given you the harshest sentence their rules permit?”
Calum almost smiled again, but Ambrose didn't trust how he was reacting. Something wasn't right, and he could guess what must be going through the man's head. If he had caused all this trouble by helping Ambrose and Pandora, two celestial criminals, escape their pursuers, why couldn't he fix it by handing them over again? Ambrose kept his own expression carefully neutral. If that was his fate, he would deal with it. For now, he needed the sanctuary.
“I still don't understand why Metatron didn’t know I was lying, why he didn't just sense you here. You say he's as close to being God as any physical being?”
Ambrose smiled. “And much more bound by God's rules than any other. Metatron has forgotten what it feels like to be a man.”
“He was...”
“Human, once. The prophet Enoch, confidant of God, taken into Heaven and made mightier than all others just before the War that saw me cast out. Quite a story, if we had time for it. The reason he couldn't tell you were lying is because you didn't. You told the truth. Metatron just asked the wrong questions. He didn't strip your mind because he was in a hurry. Finding the information you're looking for in a mind isn't like browsing a well-indexed book. It's more like trying to find something in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, with the articles in random order and no content's page, in the dark. Better to just compel the mortal to tell you what you need to hear.” Ambrose paused, frowning. “I'm not entirely certain why he'd be in such a hurry though.” Now that he thought about it, that was very odd indeed. Ambrose and Pandora were immortal. So were those hunting them. What was the rush?
“That doesn't explain why he didn't just sense you. You said you could sense other demons and angels when they were close by.”
Ambrose bit back his irritation. So many questions, when there were far more important things to be worrying about. Red-faced, sweating more by the second, Calum's need to know was burning him up. He remembered the days when he couldn't have cared less. Thinking about it, he realised he still couldn't. Glancing at Pandora, he accepted that he was controlling himself simply because she would wish him to do so. Why won't you wake up, he thought at her.
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