Life and Limb

by Jennifer Roberson

  I sighed, blinking one eye, then the other to clear my booze-blurred vision. Realized I should have eaten when I had the chance. “Can we cut to the fuc—” But I broke that off, because I caught the hard look in a hard blue eye; Grandaddy did not approve of vulgar language. “—chase?”

  Grandaddy reached inside his frock coat, drew out two small leather boxes. “Happy Birthday. Put them on: right hand, middle finger. Then shake on it.”

  “And what happens then?” I asked with suspicion, rubbing my brow. Most of my face felt numb. “We go to Oz? Hoth?”

  Grandaddy laughed. “You’ll power up your beacons out of sleep mode, punch them to 100 percent. As I said, consider them heavenly GPS units.”

  McCue looked thoughtful. “I thought you said hell can track us through these beacons.”

  “Yes, though not at every instant. But heaven can as well. That will come in handy now and then.”

  I, too, wanted clarification, even inside my booze-addled head. “Are we supposed to do something with them?”

  Grandaddy smiled widely and bared white teeth. “Use them to save the world, boys. That’s what you’ll do with them. And it’s time you two got down to business, because when you watch the news and read the papers you may think things seem bad now, but they’re going to get a whole lot worse. Because this place has just become the devil’s playground.” He paused. “And I do mean that, boys. Literally, Lucifer’s playground. Because he’s coming. The war has already begun.”

  McCue snorted. “You don’t look much like him, but you’re sounding an awful lot like the preacher back home.”

  “Jacob Tarnover,” Grandaddy said promptly. “I know him well. A devout man.”

  The cowboy was startled. “You know him personally?”

  “I know many people. I travel a lot.” Grandaddy nudged the leather boxes closer. “Open your presents. Do as I said: right hand, middle finger. Shake on it.”

  I took up the small box closest tome, flipped back the hinged lid, saw the heavy signet ring: silver pentagram embedded in a matte black stone, silver bezel and band. A glance at McCue’s showed the same.

  We stared at one another. My mouth twitched even as his brows rose. It was just too damn obvious. Low-hanging fruit. I saw a glint in his eye.

  Simultaneously, we intoned, “One ring to rule them all.”

  Grandaddy grimaced. “You are the children of pop culture, I see. Well, I can play, too: ‘One ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.’ And that’s exactly what you’re going to have to do to win this war: in the darkness bind him. For good. Throw Lucifer back into the pit.”

  “This is all kinds of bullshit,” I insisted, but knew, somewhere along the line, I’d lost the battle to make any kind of impact on the proceedings. Probably when Grandaddy sat my ass back down without moving a finger.

  McCue grinned, held his ring up in the light. “Well, boy, you ready for this rodeo?” He had a way of slurring “boy” into two syllables, forsaking the hard “y.”

  What the hell. Grandaddy clearly expected something to happen. I figured it would, or it wouldn’t, and I felt the whiskey enough to be willing to give it a try.

  I shoved the ring on, held out my hand. McCue took a little more time, seating the ring carefully on his finger, then extended his hand. We met one another’s eyes. No doubt he felt as foolish as I did. But we closed, clasped. Silver clicked faintly as the rings met.

  My heart thumped hard. Ears buzzed. I was blind, then not. The world spun. Stilled.

  “Shit!” I cried, even as McCue did.

  I felt like I was in the middle of a marathon and out of breath. Was I glowing? Were we glowing? Were our damn beacons shining? Were we transmitting to hell?

  Hands joined, silver rings touching . . . I definitely felt something. And McCue felt it, too; I could see it in his eyes. Deep inside, I sensed a certainty. A comfortable acknowledgement of . . . something. Something. Some thing. Hell, I was out of words.

  Maybe I’d never had words for a moment, an awareness, like this.

  And I disliked it intensely. You don’t just go around binding yourself to a total stranger to fight with the host of heaven to stop Armageddon. You just don’t.

  Grandaddy seemed to think you do. “This is how it shall be,” he said quietly. “Always. You’re bound now. Life and limb. Blood and bone. You are not immortal. You are not superheroes. Your bodies are wholly human. It’s the beacon—the soul—that’s the heavenly matter. So look after one another. Keep yourselves alive. It will not always be easy. But you are needed. The Adversary has loosed his vanguard. Now it’s our turn to do the same before the End of Days.”

  I wanted to accuse him of invoking Charlton Heston at the Red Sea. I did not. Images filled my head.

  Satan. Lightbringer. Son of Morning. Son of Dawn.

  Fallen archangel, thrown down from heaven itself.

  I released McCue’s hand, stared at the ring hugging my middle finger. Even drunk, I remained aware of—whatever it was. Indefinable, but, again, something.

  McCue inspected his own adornment. “Beelzebub. Belial. Diabolus. For real?”

  Grandaddy nodded. “None other. This rose, by any name, doesn’t smell sweet at all. Because it’s corrupted, and it is foul.”

  The cowboy thought that over, dark eyelashes hiding most of his eyes. Then he nodded, sighed. “Well, that’s about as welcome as an outhouse breeze.”

  I rested my head in one hand, elbow propped against the table, and contemplated the half-empty bottle of single malt. A vague thought drifted through that in the morning I might be convinced none of this had happened, so long as my brain did not bleed out of my head on a river of uisge beatha. I was so far gone now I figured I had nothing of worth left for the hot blonde who’d drunk my scotch.

  I considered mourning that—and it was worth mourning, I was certain—but my unmoored attention drifted onto another topic. “So, it’s Good versus Evil, is it?” I side-eyed McCue, then shifted back to my grandfather, who had said of the cowboy: He will have your back, and you will have his, pretty much twenty four, seven, three six five. “You want us to work together? Him and me?”

  “Because of the synchronicity of your birth, it was always the intent. And now you’re sealed to it.” Grandaddy’s eyes glinted. “Rivalry, as I said, but also harmony, partnership, shared ideals.”

  Again I shot a glance at McCue, noted his closed expression, returned my attention to Grandaddy. I knew what I was about to say would be considered rude, but I had a point to make. “Look—and yes, I know I sound like an a-hole—but I don’t even know him, Grandaddy. We’re strangers to one another. Now you say we’re responsible for one another’s lives?”

  “Everyone begins as strangers,” Grandaddy countered, “except in heaven. We are of one host, boys. We’re made of the same matter.”

  “Resistance is futile,” I quoted in derision. “But, you know, I’m not really into the whole assimilation thing.”

  McCue smiled. “Hell, boy, you might could find me a downright sociable man.”

  “Oh, God,” I muttered, too drunk to mind my tongue. “He really is Matthew McConaughey. Or Sam Elliott. Or—” I waved a hand in a circular but nonspecific direction “—anyone else who talks that Hollywood cowboy talk.”

  “West Texas,” Remi McCue corrected. “Never been to Hollywood.”

  I fixed Grandaddy with a stare bordering on stink-eye. “So if my new bestie and I are made of heaven’s matter, what the hell are you? Some kind of, I don’t know . . . angel?”

  Grandaddy smiled. “Let’s just say I’m an agent of heaven.”

  I pressed the heel of my hand against my brow and swore, but beneath my breath so Grandaddy wouldn’t hear it. Then muttered, “Please tell me you’re not going to grip me tight and raise me from perdition.”

  Remi shot me an amused glance. Gr
andaddy just rolled on. “You’re the weapons I’ve prepared, the grenades we’ll hurl, the landmines we’ll place. But in the meantime . . . well, let’s tug on Superman’s cape just a tad, shall we?”

  McCue grinned and actually sang the next line about spitting into the wind, which was a downright unhealthy thing to do as well as being messy.

  I stared at him, refused to sing the next line of the Jim Croce song, because I didn’t want to think about the Lone Ranger and his damn mask, and I never sang in bars. Especially if they were playing godawful country music.

  I shifted against the chair back, propping a boot more heavily against the floor to keep from sliding off my ass. “Just how do we go about tugging on that cape?”

  “By killing things.”

  Holy hell. The back of my neck prickled.

  The expression in Grandaddy’s eyes told me he knew exactly what kind of impact that simple sentence had on me, and why.

  The cowboy stirred uneasily. “Grandaddy—”

  “I said things,” Grandaddy said clearly. “Not humans—well, unless certain humans insist; there are evil people out there. No.” He looked at us both for a long moment. “I told you. Lucifer has loosed his vanguard. Well, he was never stupid, that archangel. Just too proud, too arrogant, too ambitious. He had, shall we say, an overdeveloped sense of entitlement.”

  McCue’s smile hooked sideways again.

  “And it cost him heaven,” Grandaddy went on. “So, if you were a smart, devious archangel stuck in hell and wanted to begin softening up the world for your long-prophesied return, how would you go about it?” He leaned forward, tapped a forefinger on the tabletop. “You would exploit disbelief. You would exploit skepticism. You would use all those things people believe don’t exist. Legends, stories, myths.” He looked at me. “You’re the folklorist. Don’t you believe?”

  Oh, this was undoubtedly a trap. I recognized it from childhood. With care, I allowed, “Much folklore has roots in some portion of reality. Something happened, or existed, that inspired the stories.”

  “Same with religion,” McCue agreed.

  “But that doesn’t mean every detail is true,” I continued, launching into a lecture mode I hadn’t used in years. “We’re here in the Southwest, so let’s take the urban legend of the chupacabra, the Mexican goat-sucker. Is there really such a beast? I don’t think so. What I believe is that someone saw a big-ass feral dog, or an oversized coyote, probably mange-ridden and half hairless, killing a goat for a meal.” I hitched one shoulder into a shrug. “Well, hell, that’s boring. And maybe the guy was drunk, or high on weed or peyote, so he made a tall tale out of it.”

  McCue was nodding. “We have that legend in Texas, too. Reports of sightings crop up from time to time, and animal deaths that are believed to be caused by a chupacabra.”

  “Sure,” I agreed. “That’s because these kinds of stories are like contagious infections. And there are always gullible people, or hoaxers; or total whackjobs, too, who buy anything.” I paused. “And conspirorists.”

  McCue stared at me. “Conspirorists? That’s a thing?”

  “Conspiracy theorists.” I shrugged. “Saves a word.”

  Grandaddy said quietly, “And so, too, are there skeptics who dismiss everything.” Despite the pallor of bar lighting, his eyes burned brightly. “There was a man, a French poet, who understood. It’s a famous quote, and you’ll undoubtedly recognize it, or some form of it. Charles Baudelaire said: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”

  After a long moment, I expelled a chuffing sigh. This was going nowhere at hyperspace speed.

  “I’m an accommodating man,” McCue said, in a more circumspect tone, “and I like to think of myself as open-minded. But. You know there has to be a ‘but.’ Convince me.”

  “There were several earthquakes in the last month,” Grandaddy said quietly. “Japan, Turkey, South America, Russia, New Zealand, Northern California, other places as well. The ground opened up in each of those places, and things came out.”

  I had been somewhat aware of the news in prison, if not intimately acquainted with it, but became more familiar on the ride down the coast via overhearing snatches of conversation in bars and restaurants. “Things?” I quoted, wary.

  “The devil’s surrogates. And they have assumed many guises.” His look on me was intended to be quelling. “Yes, Gabriel, it is indeed just as you said: everything in folklore, everything in the tallest of tales, in all the myths—even religion, as Remi noted—has roots in reality.”

  I wanted to clarify. “I said portions of reality.”

  Grandaddy nodded. “Which assumes at least a spark of it. Even a minute speck of reality is still reality.”

  I was too drunk to parse semantics with a man as clever as this one, so I just squinted at him.

  “When hell’s vents opened,” Grandaddy said, “our reality was altered. It’s been expanded upon. Those minute specks are now much larger. Therefore all those ghosties, ghoulies, things that go bump in the night, are now very real, and have been for some time. So are werewolves, vampires, black dogs, poltergeists, even your goat-sucking chupacabras, plus countless other members of the dark hierarchy. But worse than that—”

  “Worse?” I yelped.

  “—many now host surrogates, or will. And if a surrogate climbs inside any of those so-called mythical hosts, the threat is trebled. They are all of them Lucifer’s creatures, made of hell’s matter, not heaven’s. Far worse than the stories.”

  “Surrogates?” I repeated. “I take it you’re not talking about political mouthpieces and spin doctors.”

  Grandaddy said, “Another name is demon. But we avoid that in public.”

  McCue said after a moment, as if in passing, “Well, that’s handy as a latch on an outhouse door.”

  I grunted. “I think an argument could be made that political surrogates might actually be demons.”

  Grandaddy ignored me. “Faith is certainty without evidence,” he said. “Faith is safety. Disbelief? Well, these days, that’s a doorway to surrogates. It allows them to enter. To wreak havoc among unbelievers.”

  I stared at him. If Baudelaire had nailed it, Lucifer was indeed one damn smart fallen archangel. But . . . “That’s a narrow mythos, Grandaddy. There are more religions in the world than Christianity, and more holy books than the Bible. Folklore is of all cultures.”

  “A rose by any name, Gabriel.”

  “And every religion has a villain,” McCue said. “Don’t matter what he’s called. Or she. Or it. Evil’s evil.”

  “There are questions to come, and answers,” Grandaddy said, “but regardless of the name of the belief system and its own rituals, whatever they may be, the war has begun. The harbingers have risen. They’ve come to pave the way, to destroy. So we must destroy them. As of tonight, you two are being employed. Being deployed.” He swallowed beer, brushed moisture from his mustache, then gazed benignly upon us both. “Childhood’s over, boys. Happy Birthday. Happy Re-Birthday. You’re now in the vanguard of the heavenly host.”

  After a moment, McCue grinned slow, though something in his eyes spoke of an emotion other than amusement. “Well, ain’t that just sweeter than stolen honey?”

  I blinked hard, tried to clear my vision. He was wearing two hats. Had two faces. But I had to ask. “Is that for real? That accent?”

  “I am Texas born and raised . . .” And then he broke off, appeared to reconsider that this claim, in view of what our grandfather had divulged, perhaps needed amending. “Texas raised, at least. It sticks to you. And ya’ll better get used to it.”

  “But it—” I flipped a hand back and forth, “—waxes and wanes.”

  McCue smiled. “Depends on when it’s good ol’ boy affectation or just me talkin’.”

  I, with a mind not as sharp as it had been before so
much whiskey, decided against continuing that topic and turned to Grandaddy and cut to the chase. “Since we’re angels, do we at least get wings?”

  Grandaddy shook his head decisively. “You’re not angels. Not yet. For now, you’re almost entirely human. Baby steps, boys. It will take you time.” His eyes were on me. “But as of tonight you will begin to recall certain things, and those memories will guide you.”

  “Almost entirely human,” I quoted dryly. “Almost entirely? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” When Grandaddy didn’t answer, I heaved a sigh. “So, I’m an angel-wannabe. Except I don’t wanna be.”

  And McCue, for no reason I could remotely begin to decipher, began quietly to sing. Again. But it wasn’t what the band was playing.

  My head was throbbing. “Now what are you singing?”

  “It’s a country song. Charley Pride. ‘Kiss an Angel Good Morning.’”

  I gazed at him in frank disbelief. “A guy we believed was our old family friend is an agent of heaven—and I’d call that an angel, myself—we’ve got heavenly GPS units inside us, we’re supposed to save life, the universe, and everything—and you’re singing Charley Pride?”

  McCue shrugged. “I can sing Willie Nelson, if that floats your boat into calmer waters. Maybe ‘Angel Flying Too Close to the Ground.’ Which might could be really appropriate, if things are fixin’ to go sideways.”

  I grabbed up the whiskey and began chugging straight from the bottle again.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  I awakened hard and fast with the thick, acrid taste of sour bile in my mouth.

  Whiskey. Too much. I’d drowned in it, bathed in it, soaked my brain and gut in it. I had a hard head for booze, but not like this; not so much gulped in so short a time, especially being off booze for so long thanks to an unexpected vacation behind bars.

  What was it Grandaddy had said—?