Life and Limb

by Jennifer Roberson

  I frowned. “Handy enough. Where’s this going?”

  “Grandaddy ever show up and teach you how to throw? I mean, how to use actual throwing knives?”

  I shook my head. “We spent most of our time shooting.”

  McCue nodded. “I’m a good shot. Rifle, handgun; I’m a Texas boy, and I grew up on a ranch. But Grandaddy always wanted me to work special on knife skills.”

  I remembered my grandfather suggesting I learn how to handle a knife. But then, my father—my human father—was a former soldier, current cop, and it was natural the man would want his sons to be skilled. I had indeed learned. Wore a knife at my belt, carried another in my Harley’s saddle bags.

  But Grandaddy had always taken me shooting. “You’re saying he specifically targeted our training.”

  “I’m saying it’s an idea,” McCue clarified. “And something worth asking about when we’re up on the mountain.”

  My brows rose. “You don’t trust him.”

  “No, no . . .” He lifted a belaying hand. “I trust that man with my life. I just want to be sure I understand what he intends for me to do with it.”

  I lifted one shoulder in a half-shrug. “The battle of Good versus Evil. Isn’t that what he said?”

  Remi tilted his head, and the hat went with it. “Is there such a thing?”

  I’d thought on it throughout my life. I’d thought on it long and hard. Before I went to school, at school, when I wrote papers and my thesis, before walking away from my future. In talks with fellow students, fellow teaching assistants, even with professors caught up in the esoterica of academia.

  My intellect claimed it was an exercise in freedom of thought not necessarily moored to reality.

  My gut said otherwise.

  I looked at McCue. Made no comment, but I had the feeling he’d follow.

  Remi’s blue eyes were bright. “If you accept that . . . then maybe there’s truth in everything Grandaddy’s ever said—and ever will.”

  Grandaddy an angel—or, well, an agent of heaven.

  Lucifer, real.

  The run-up on earth to the End of Days.

  Surrogates—demons—walked the earth, and put on the guise of legends, and myths, and campfire stories.

  “So,” I said, “we’re ghostbusters?”

  Remi McCue’s smile broadened. “I’m thinkin’ more like Michaels.”

  I squinted. “The craft store?”

  “No, asshat, as in the archangel Michael. Otherwise known as the Sword of Heaven.”

  “He’s only one archangel,” I said, “of the four we know best. Maybe we’re Raphaels, or Uriels, or—” And I stopped dead.

  Remi’s tone was dryly amused. “Gabriels?”

  Shit. “I do not want to be an angel. Or even a proto-angel.”

  “Archangel might be nice, though.” McCue sounded downright philosophical. “Remiel, well, he’s not so high and mighty as the Big Four, but he’s a good guy.”

  I frowned, perplexed.

  “Angel of hope,” he said, “and I’m sure hopin’ we can win this rodeo.”

  I squinted at him. “I’m too hung over for this.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The trail was called Fatman’s Loop, for no reason I could determine, and it wound up the stony, fire-ravaged flanks of what was, Grandaddy told us, Mount Elden in the San Francisco Peaks on the northern outskirts of Flagstaff, once an active volcano. It was a rough skein of a trail attended by sentinel Ponderosa pines, scatterings of oaks and aspens, and other scrubby vegetation. An elevation of 7,000 feet sucked a fair amount of oxygen from the air, and a man working through the effects of a hangover knew it. I felt aged beyond my years, thirsty, fatigued, and sweat trailed down neck and chest and stuck the thin cotton weave of my black t-shirt to my torso.

  Motorcycle leathers had a purpose—for motorcycles. They provided a tough layer against the onslaught of asphalt or gravel, should a bike go down. Not so good, though, for a man hiking up a mountain in thin air, in summer, no matter how attractive the surroundings, though at least I’d left my jacket at the motel. Here it was very dry, unlike the moist, rain-laden environment of the Pacific Northwest. The trails were no more challenging, but when hiking with Grandaddy in Oregon I hadn’t been wearing motorcycle boots, or sweating whiskey out of my pores, or wrestling with the announcement made the night before that I was a part of heaven.

  That I was born of heaven.

  That I now had some kind of celestial partner and was destined—and how the hell had my life become weighted with words like that?—to be a soldier in the front lines of an angelic army intended to fight evil. To keep Lucifer from returning to take over the whole damn world.

  My so-called grandfather, who knew things, as I had always viewed it, offered no intel at the moment. Grandaddy climbed the mountain with a walking staff in one hand, lacking Gandalf’s robes, perhaps, but none of the gravitas, the secrecy, the seeming awareness of portents, of knowledge, of elements of information held apart from his own grandsons—or, well, whatever the hell we were to him these days. Amoebas, maybe, in the celestial pecking order.

  Grandaddy went up first, with McCue just behind. I toiled at a slight remove, thinking I’d really rather be back in a motel room; or, better yet, in a sports bar, watching men meet on the fields of athletic battle, rather than being aimed as weapons in a heavenly war.

  It was a popular trail, and we were not alone on the mountain. But brief meetings with others consisted of water breaks, or viewings of where they’d come from and where they were bound, and the occasional curious dog.

  Mountain lions, one older gentleman warned, he of the mashed hat worn against the sun; the crumpled khaki clothing; the browned, aging flesh and a sparse gray ponytail. Don’t let your dogs run loose, he said pointedly, gray eyes fierce, because lions might take them down from the heights.

  Since no dogs accompanied us I was not certain what this kind of suggestion actually meant, but McCue thanked the man with immense charm and courtesy, exchanging pleasantries, said farewell with a polite tip of his hat, and did not bother to point out to the gentleman that we had no canines with us that might be at risk of being taken by lions.

  Not even by fleas, I reflected, though possibly flies.

  Up we went again, until Grandaddy called halt at a cluster of granite boulders just beyond a crowded cluster of immature oaks in the midst of massive pines, and bade us enjoy the view.

  McCue perched his jean-clad ass atop a pile of boulders, set his booted feet, removed his hat to scrub a forearm through neatly trimmed hair, hooked the hat over a knee and smiled into the day as he stared across the distances. I, on the other hand, simply stopped walking, pulled a plastic bottle from a back pocket, sucked down water. I could smell the whiskey exiting my flesh on perspiration. So much for the shower.

  “Well?” Grandaddy said. “What did you notice?”

  “That man,” McCue observed, “was not entirely a man, now, was he?”

  I frowned at him. “Which man? We passed several.”

  “The old man. The one who warned us about mountain lions.” Remi’s brows rose. “You didn’t feel it? He wasn’t warning us about dogs, you know. That was meant for us. Be careful where we go, because danger awaits.”

  I found it baffling. “You got that from an old man you talked to for, like, maybe five minutes?”

  After a moment, McCue turned to gaze up at Grandaddy, standing amidst the sunlight in the bright backdrop of the day. “I would like to say his mama didn’t raise a fool, but I’m beginnin’ to wonder.”

  Grandaddy smiled. “Don’t underestimate Gabriel. His strengths lie elsewhere.”

  “Who was he?” Remi asked, ignoring my side-eye.

  “An angel; and yes, that was a message. You’ll find the world is full of messages—and full of angels—now that you’re awakened. Som
e will be clear; some won’t be; some will be wrong. And, if I may be permitted to wax Biblical a moment, false witness shall be borne.” A trace of breeze stirred Grandaddy’s hair. “You’ve been around them all your lives, but no one knew you, either of you. Hide in plain sight, as I said. But those beacons I mentioned? Your heavenly souls? They are the seat of your strength, the homeplace of your spirits, but they are also the lodestones that others will follow to find you. There is much benevolence in the world, fragments of heaven made whole as living beings, if not wholly human; but just as he warned you, there are lions upon the heights who will try to take down the dogs.”

  I gusted air through my nose. “Can I at least be a big tough Rottweiler? Not a wussy little Chihuahua?”

  “Shows you know nothin’ about dogs,” McCue observed. “Those are tough little suckers. They’ll chew your toes clean off your feet and then grin at you.”

  Grandaddy’s blue eyes were bright. “You, Gabriel? Pit bull. Most certainly. But carefully bred, socialized, well-trained . . . and your purpose will come clear.”

  I pounced on it. “Just what is my purpose, Grandaddy? Exactly my purpose. Spell it out. You laid a lot on us last night.”

  His gesture guided our view beyond the mountain flank. “Take a look out there, boys. Tell me what you see.”

  It was a sun-rich day among the pines, with skies so blue it nearly hurt my whiskey-buffered head because I’d stupidly left my sunglasses in my saddlebags. Below lay a ribbon of road, and a massive lone hill of red volcanic cinders that had once been mined. Half the hill was eaten away. Beyond lay vast expanses of flat earth and occasional convolutions of cinder hills. The Peaks themselves were a huddled cluster of an extinct volcano’s cones and craters, overtaken by Ponderosa, aspen, oak, various scrub vegetation, grasses.

  “I see forever,” McCue said, voice smooth and contemplative. “The unending earth.”

  “He appears to be a poet,” I said with dry amusement, without rancor or sting. I didn’t know the guy, but we were stuck in the same whackoid shit going down. “Yeah, it’s a big world. But why is that hill so torn up? Looks like a big ol’ shark chomped on it.”

  “They don’t use salt on the roads in winter, here,” Grandaddy answered. “They lay down cinders . . . which, lacking the protective nature of salt, consecrated or not, makes this area ripe for activity of the unnatural kind. But they don’t work that hill anymore. Cinders for the roads are hauled in from more distant cones.” He paused. “Gabriel, I want you to think about where you are. Tell me what you feel. What you sense.”

  I was hung over, tired, short on oxygen. But this was nothing new from Grandaddy; he suggested this whenever we’d gone exploring on his visits. So it was with nostalgia and a certain ease of spirit, of familiarity, that I loosed my awareness of the here and now and let the sense of the immediate environs come to the fore.

  I closed my eyes, made my heart slow, allowed my awareness of self to be at peace.

  A bright day, warm but not hot; clean, fresh air; the sound of insects, of birds, of air in the grasses; the rush of wind among the trees. My inner self caught a flash of yellow color, a reflection off something opalescent, the watery blurring of pastel colors layered one upon the other.

  It rose like a tide within me, the sense of calm, of quietude, of a deep, earth-anchored spirituality.

  I smiled, opened my eyes. “It’s sacred. To the Navajo, Sacred Mountain of the West. Abalone Shell Mountain. Doko’oosliid. And to the Hopi, a home to spirits. Katsinam. Kachinas. A place to find a way through koyaanisqatsi, life out of balance. Up here on this mountain, we’re safe.”

  “Huh,” Remi said after a moment. “That one of those strengths you were talkin’ about, Grandaddy? He’s a sensitive?”

  “To places, but not to people. He’s not an empath. People, for Gabriel,”—Grandaddy smiled a little—“remain something of a challenge. You, on the other hand, do understand people. You are an empath. You balance one another, Remi; and yes, koyaanisqatsi is indeed life out of balance, and that is exactly what is happening now. Your job is to help restore the balance.” He looked at me. “You dreamed, did you not? Last night?”

  I was unsurprised he knew. I nodded.

  “That stunt you pulled putting Matthew’s life at risk.”

  I winced; stated like that it sounded so very much worse . . . but, well, yeah. I had indeed put my kid brother’s life at risk.

  “It was a test I knew would come in some fashion,” Grandaddy said. “Matthew was your brother in flesh, so there was a bond, but not in soul. Nonetheless, you had the instinct. Some recognize it, embrace it. Others duck it, or just never awaken to it. I didn’t doubt that you’d awaken to it and consent.”

  I frowned. “Awaken to what?”

  “The stewardship of the younger. It’s what you did with Matthew all of his life. That day, though—that was for Remi.”

  I was aware of McCue’s hatless head coming up sharply as he, too, stared intently at our grandfather.

  “That day?” I echoed. “The day I nearly got Matty killed? How the hell was that day for this guy?”

  “Matthew was Remi’s proxy. He represented the younger brother you needed to have, to trigger the drive to protect.” Grandaddy smiled. “There’s always an alpha, Gabriel. That’s the role of the eldest, because he or she is first. The first precedes the others, prepares the way, makes smooth the path for the younger to follow. Your instinct was always to protect Matthew no matter what, regardless of any danger . . . because that’s what you’ll do for Remi. That’s what primogenitura is.”

  I shot a quick glance at McCue, switched back to Grandaddy and waited for more. More always came, with Grandaddy.

  “Find two soldiers who fought together,” he advised. “Ask them about the bond battle creates. They are far more than ‘besties.’ As for you and Remi, that instinct you had for Matthew is the instinct you have, or will have, for Remi. You just don’t know it yet, don’t feel it. That day when you offered to carry your brother’s pain, begged me to lift it from him, to give it to you, I knew you were ready. And you consented. But you weren’t sealed to Matthew that day, Gabriel, because he wasn’t heaven-born. That day prepared the way. Last night, when you put on the rings and clasped hands, you and Remi were sealed to one another.”

  I looked sharply to McCue, saw the cowboy staring back, equally startled. We neither of us knew what to do with the information. I could only see Matty in my head, in my memories; I had no clue what McCue was thinking.

  Sealed to one another?

  I lifted my right hand and examined the back of it, studied the ring upon my middle finger. Rubbed the ball of my left thumb over silver pentagram, black stone. When I raised my eyes, I found McCue staring back. While his face appeared relaxed, the expression in his eyes was a myriad of complex thoughts I couldn’t define.

  But then the cowboy smiled crookedly, looked back at Grandaddy, an angel from on high. Regardless of semantics. The surface of Remi’s tone was casual, but there were undertones within it. “So, I’m the beta, am I?”

  “There’s a reason you grew up with an older brother, Remi,” Grandaddy said. “Birth order affects development. You’re not lesser. Beta merely means second. Younger. Gabriel’s spark simply quickened before yours. That doesn’t make him better. Remember: even with twins, one is born first.”

  McCue considered it in silence, then nodded slightly. “Primogeniture is known mostly as a medieval concept. But it extends farther back than that. All the way to Biblical times.” He looked at me. “Predisposition. Predestination. Guess we’ll find out if they apply, won’t we? Bein’ together in the trenches, and all.”

  So, Remi McCue was not entirely an amiable beta soul. I looked at Grandaddy, found him smiling faintly. I asked a silent question.

  “It will come,” Grandaddy promised. “It’s a process.”

  I shook my hea
d. “We have lives. Hell, I just got mine back. You can’t expect us to walk away from everything.”

  Grandaddy’s voice took on an edge unlike anything I’d heard from him before. My skin itched, and I stared at him in shock. He was doing something again.

  “That’s exactly what I expect, Gabriel. This is the End of Days I’m talking about, with the fate of the world at stake. Everyone born of heaven must answer this call, if we’re to succeed. Is it a sacrifice?—of course it is. But there is nothing in your lives that is of greater importance than this.” His eyes were steady. “You have never disappointed me. Don’t do so now.”

  I looked for compassion. Found none. “What about our families?”

  Grandaddy didn’t even attempt to hedge. “I said we could massage things. Well, I have massaged the minds of your parents and brother. They believe you are in prison finishing your sentence.”

  “But that’s only six more months.”

  “And your father’s reaction once you’re out? Would you be welcome in his house?”

  After a long moment, I said no. Because I remembered what my father had said—even if he didn’t because of Grandaddy’s brain massage. That night on the porch, as I rolled my bike out of the garage, felt like a death-knell. My mother stayed inside, and Matty was probably out getting high.

  “And what would you do, Gabriel?”

  “Get on my bike and head out. Maybe for good.”

  Grandaddy nodded. “Well, we will free you of that. They will remember no hostilities, only that you, once your sentence is served, are on the road. And so you are free to do your duty without interference for however long it takes.”

  “Just cut them off like that, huh?” Though I wouldn’t much miss my father. I glanced at the cowboy, looked back at Grandaddy. “What about him?”

  “Remi is traveling the world undertaking research for the book he plans on writing. And he may, from time to time, call home to reassure his parents. But the calls will show overseas locations, nothing in this country. You, on the other hand, may drop postcards to your mother once your sentence is completed. Your father’s a son of a bitch, but she’s a worthy woman.”