Sinners and Saints

by Jennifer Roberson

  But her attention shifted. “My brother’s body was clean and whole?”

  “It was. He was given funeral rites fit for a great hero, and buried with honor.”

  She was sad but looked relieved. “Apollo’s curse is fitful. It comes upon me, but the loom is crooked-built and all the yarn is tangled.”

  “Cassandra,” Greg said sharply. Then she softened her tone, extended a hand. “We must go before the hound can take you and carry you to Hades.”

  It was all impulse. I just blurted it out to Cassandra before she could go to Greg. “Stay, if you want. You can stay. You have free choice. Don’t let her make you go with her if you don’t want to.”

  “Stay out of this!” Greg cried. “This is too big for you. You lack the capacity to understand any portion of the stakes! You don’t matter for anything, the two of you! Don’t interfere.”

  “Your choice,” I told Cassandra, ignoring the angry angel.

  Cassandra nodded, took my hand again, said something in Greek, then left me and went to stand immediately in front of the Grigori.

  Massive black wings burst forth, then swirled down and around, feathers gleaming like oil. First Greg’s arms surrounded Cassandra, and then the wings did as well. We saw one more glimpse of Ambriel’s furious eyes, and then she bowed her head low. Feathers shifted, wings closed. She was absolutely still a long moment, encased in feathers, and then the wings snapped back.

  Cassandra was gone.

  A moment later so was Greg.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Remi and I were left dumbfounded, staring at the space where the two had just stood beneath the moonlight before a cross and altar: Cassandra of Troy—she of the twelfth or eleventh century Before Christ—and an ageless angel.

  Then Cerberus growled and screamed and shrieked outside, and we forgot about the women and their disappearing act.

  “Alrighty, then.” I tried to inject lightness into an otherwise dire situation. “I think we can say we’ve been well and truly ‘dissed’ by an angel, not kissed. I guess our next step is to try and take out the monster dog before our weak little reconsecration ward fails—we being such useless, helpless, fragile little flowers and all.”

  “Called cannon fodder,” Remi said, in something approaching his own version of a growl, “and I ain’t too fond of that title. Time to prove we’ve got more going on than the Grigori give us credit for.”

  “I guess then this might be considered ‘diss and tell.’” I pulled the magic phone from my pocket, checked for messages from Grandaddy, found none. So I called him again, got no answer again, left a message again. “That woman we were looking after because she’d been assaulted? Well, she’s Cassandra of Troy—yeah, the psychic who predicted the city’s fall—and we got tricked into bringing her out here to the little Holy Dove chapel by that Grigori I told you about—name’s Ambriel, remember?—and Ambriel took her off somewhere. She’s not a fan of yours, Ambriel isn’t. Now we’re stuck here at the chapel with three-headed Cerberus outside trying to get in to eat our livers, so we ‘might could,’ as Remi says, use a little assistance. Sometime this year would be helpful.” I disconnected.

  Remi’s brows were up. “I’m surprised you got all that on there before it cut off.”

  “Oh, it cut off about the time I got to ‘She’s not a fan of yours,’ but I was on a roll and kept going. He knows where we are now and what happened, so maybe he’ll come save us from the big bad dog.”

  “You don’t want us to give it a try?”

  “Sure I do. But just in case we can’t kill it, we ought to have a backup plan.” I opened the revolver, rolled the cylinder, judged everything in working condition, gusted my breath over it again, clicked it closed. “How about I concentrate on one of the heads first, and you go for the body. After that it’s every man for himself.”

  Remi grabbed one of the garden benches, dragged it over to the entrance. “We ought to prop open the door, give us a chance to dive back inside if it comes to that.”

  I look at him askance. “I’m pretty sure that if he comes through the ward, we won’t make it back inside. We’ll be doggie liver treats.”

  “The fastest of us will make it inside, ’cuz the dog’ll catch the slow one first,” Remi pointed out. “And right now you’ve got a hitch in your git-along, so I’m figurin’ it’ll be me comin’ back through the door.”

  “Asshole.”

  “Yessir.”

  I brought the backlight up on the heavenly phone. I couldn’t find a list of apps, just contact icons for a few people, one of whom was here with me. “No flashlight?” I muttered. “You’d think heaven would be all about casting light upon the land.”

  “Well, unless it’s like Ambriel said and there is no light or dark, just grays.”

  “Bull.”

  “Well, maybe. But the moon’s bright.”

  “And it casts dark shadows,” I said, “heavy enough to provide good hiding places.”

  Remi turned on his app. On his regular phone, that is; mine was back at the Zoo. I was going to have a talk with Grandaddy about installing proper apps as well as about a rogue Grigori. In the meantime, I opened the door, brought it back as far as it could go, shoved the bench over to prop it open.

  We both had our guns in hand. Remi stood beside the door, hugging the wall, and stuck the phone around the jamb on an outstretched arm. I peered around from the other side. The flashlight app really wasn’t powerful enough to beat back the deeper shadows. All we saw out front was Remi’s pickup.

  Which, we discovered, as Cerberus screamed at the heavens, now hosted a Great Dane-sized, three-headed, snake-tailed monster in the bed. He looked for all the world like an ugly-ass ranch dog riding around during chores.

  Remi shouted so loudly he damn near took an ear off my head. “You born-sorry no-account looks-like-a-sheep-killer dog! We ain’t on borrowin’ terms, so you get your ass out of my truck!”

  To punctuate that, he walked out of the chapel very close to where I’d indicated the safety zone began, and cut loose with three shots of the .410 powdered iron shells.

  Well, okay.

  I joined him, giving him room to move as he wanted. But me, I went with the .45-caliber rounds.

  I tried eyes. I tried chest. Remi shot into his body. Cerberus just stood there, three sets of crimson eyes glowing and all his prodigious teeth bared while his snake tail writhed. He emitted that horrible growl again, then scaled it up to the screech with all three heads thrown back.

  We didn’t miss. And the monster didn’t die. He didn’t go down. He didn’t even wobble.

  Remi threw every knife he had. I saw them strike point-first, and I saw them fall.

  Outrage actually canceled out fear. Well, for a minute. My voice went up an octave. “What, he’s wearing body armor?”

  And then Cerberus cocked all three heads in unison, as if listening to something. Abruptly he jumped over the far side of the truck bed and took off running. Fortunately it was in the direction going away from us. The last we saw of him was the flip of his snake-tail as he ran beneath the moon, and then he was gone.

  No predator leaves prey if he is impervious to said prey’s defense mechanisms. Predator leaves prey if something even bigger shows up.

  And then the ground rippled beneath our feet.

  Or an earthquake shows up.

  I grabbed the Texas-bred and -born flatlander by one arm and yanked him away from the chapel. He staggered, regained his balance three steps later, jerked his arm out of my hand and scowled at me. “What the hell was that for?”

  I pointed at the chapel. “Buildings fall down in earthquakes. Buildings fall down after earthquakes, too, if they’re strong enough, or the aftershocks are.”

  We turned even as the ripple died away and the earth solidified. It really hadn’t been much. Just a quiver. But Remi and I hu
ng around out front for five long minutes just in case—he inspected his truck and reclaimed his knives, said at least the dog had not pissed in the bed—but we heard no creaking of over-stressed wooden structure, no cracking of stone half-walls, no shattering of big windows in the far end of the chapel.

  I declared it safe enough to go back inside, check things out. I was curious about whether the unique departure of Cassandra and Greg left anything behind that might tell us where they’d gone, and son of a gun if there wasn’t a single black feather lying in the moonlight.

  “Hah,” I said. “A calling card.”

  “Or a warning.”

  “Warning of what?” I squatted, studied the feather more closely without touching it. One could not be too careful, especially as Greg had not proven herself particularly pleased with our behavior. Finally I reached out a hand, poked it with a finger, then actually picked the thing up.

  Six inches long, but not, I knew, the longest of flight feathers. To lift a human’s mass, even a small woman, the wings would have to be immense. And while we’d seen only the suggestion and promise of Grandaddy’s wings, Greg had unfurled hers completely at Wupatki, and when she slammed them together it created a humongous thunderclap and a buffet of air so powerful it had knocked Remi and I on our asses. Here she’d unfurled them, snapped them open, but then she’d brought them down into a tight smothering curl around Cassandra’s body and her own.

  My smile was crooked, but it came. A feather from an angel’s wing. Who’d a thunk it?

  And then I managed to give myself a cut from checking out a feather’s edge, and I announced to Remi that angels’ wings are pretty much razor blades along the edges. Which made sense, because I remember the zzzip of Shemyazaz’s wing slipping across my nose. Then I put my finger in my mouth.

  Remi resettled his hat. “Let’s go on back. Nothing for us to do here. I’d say we should re-reconsecrate, except the Grigori sure put no stock in our abilities to do much of anything effective. We can let Grandaddy know. Maybe he’ll do it or send someone.”

  “Yeah—if he ever bothers to return my calls.” I pushed the garden bench back from the door and returned it to where it belonged. “You know, I was all for sleeping elsewhere if you wanted to entertain Mary Jane, but right about now I just want to go crash face-first into my bed.”

  Remi sounded surprised. “That’s downright generous of you. I wasn’t thinkin’ tonight, but give or take another day or two and I may take you up on it.”

  “I know these things.” I held up the feather. “I’m your wingman.”

  Remi rolled his eyes. “Let’s go, son. We got us some sheep to count, even if this is cattle country.”

  We both climbed back into the truck, thinking various thoughts regarding such things as monstrous dogs, angry angels, and a very very old woman from Troy, then pulled our seatbelts across simultaneously and shoved the tongues home in the receivers.

  Remi backed us out as I put the feather in the glovebox for safekeeping until we got back to the Zoo. “Big day,” I remarked as Remi turned out onto the highway and goosed the accelerator with a heavy foot. “Ghost at the ravine, demon teacher at NAU, Molly the stalker-demon, Jack the Ripper delivering the mail—or one of his hench-demons—and the Cassandra of Troy telling me my fortune, plus a pissed off Grigori and Cerberus.”

  “And an earthquake,” Remi added.

  “And an earthquake. I think—oh shit—” I braced myself. “Remi—”

  Remi ran into it. He just flat ran into whatever it was because there was absolutely no time to avoid it. I didn’t even see it until the split second before the truck made contact. It was a roiling black shape coming out of the night on a very dark highway. The thing flipped toward us over the hood and landed smack up against the windshield.

  I’d hit an elk once, back in Oregon. I’d been in a car, not on my bike, thank God, but the big buck had been flipped up onto my hood and smashed into the windshield, making a hole in the glass. The tines of one heavy antler had barely missed me.

  Remi stood on the brakes to get the truck stopped as quickly as possible, muttering frantic curses under his breath as tires screeched, and just as he threw it into park we unholstered guns and bailed out our respective doors. The warning chime about the key in the ignition with the doors left open and headlights left on ding-ding-ding-dinged repeatedly, but we paid it no attention.

  And then the thing sprawled across the hood moved, leaped to its feet, and Shemyazaz, shedding flesh and feathers in the carnage of his hell-burned form, loomed over us from his perch atop the truck. I saw a flock of bright orbs strobing, his glass acolytes, moving in agitation all around his body.

  “Where is she?” he shouted. And then he roared it, arms spread. “Where is she?”

  I was profoundly baffled. “Where is who?”

  “Where is the betrayer? I can smell her on you. Where is the Grigori?”

  Remi sounded downright testy. “Get the hell off my truck. It already had a monster dog in it; we don’t need a burned-up angel in it, too. We don’t know where she went. She just wrapped herself up in her wings and had Scotty beam her somewhere.”

  Shemyazaz bared naked teeth in a wide, lipless rictus. “Get her back!”

  “We can’t get her back,” I explained. “We don’t know how she got here in the first place. She came, and she went. She’s not here.”

  He spread his legs, lifted his arms, unfurled his ruined wings. The orbs strobed to black, then white. “I want her. I want her here. Bring her to me.”

  “We can’t,” I told him sharply, my own anger kindling. “Look, we’ve got no stake in whatever issue you have with her, but Greg just comes and goes. We can’t call her; she’s not in our phones. She just—appears.”

  Of a sudden he dropped into a crouch upon the hood. He leaned outward on two knees and one braced arm, then abruptly wrapped a hand around the back of my neck and yanked me toward him. His thumb sat on my Adam’s apple, and I was pretty sure I felt a claw. Our faces were possibly three inches apart. He stared hard into my eyes.

  It was the first time I’d smelled sulfur. Always before the odor had been that sweetish, cloying fug, powerful incense like perfume on steroids. But those had been demons. Shemyazaz was an angel, and I’d never smelled anything of him in his burned form other than a faint charred scent. But this reek was—different.

  Remi’s tone was exquisitely conversational. “I think we’re done here. Let’s call it a night. Gabe doesn’t know where she is, I don’t know where she is, and you don’t know where she is. Between the three of us knowin’ a whole passel of nothin’ much, we’re not getting her back here. Gabe and I are, as Ambriel pointed out earlier this evening, pretty much as useful as tits on a boar-hog. So how ’bout you go off and look for her your own self, while we go along home to bed.”

  Yes, it was a claw at the tip of his thumb. I arrived at that conclusion because it pierced my neck. I released a low involuntary blurt of reaction. The charred but living fingers on the back of my neck tightened.

  Remi took a step closer. “He doesn’t know—”

  Shemyazaz thrust his other hand into the air, showing the flat of his hand to Remi. He said nothing, but Remi stopped short. I did not think it was his decision. The orbs flocked around him, as if to keep him in place.

  Again the angel stared hard into my eyes. I made certain to meet his and not do so much as move an eyelash. I don’t know what Shemyazaz saw in my eyes, or whether Remi’s recommendation had an effect, but he let me go. He smiled as he saw the trickle of blood, then shoved me away with a hard thrust of his hand against my chest. After two long steps backward I regained my balance, set a hand to my throat and coughed.

  “I want her,” the angel declared. “If you see her, take her for me. I will have her.” He slid down off the truck, put his hand upon me again and once more shoved me back several steps. “Bring her. B
ring her to me.”

  I stared right back at him. “I’m a fragile little flower, but the merest cannon fodder. How in the hell am I supposed to find a Grigori if the first and the highest of the bene ha’elohim can’t?”

  As Shemyazaz stared at us both, the key-in-the-ignition warning chime dinged over and over again.

  “I want her,” he repeated.

  “We get that,” Remi said tightly, “but we don’t know where she is.”

  Shemyazaz, clearly still furious and frustrated, pushed between us, knocked us aside in a petty show of dominance. Remi and I stared at each other briefly, both of us at sea, then turned to watch the broken angel walk out of the reach of headlights. He disappeared into darkness with streaking orbs in his wake.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Remi and I stood in the middle of the two-lane road staring after the now-departed angel. Headlights showed us asphalt, white paint, yellow paint, green pines gone black beneath the moon. Remi muttered something, went to yank the key from the ignition and shut off the unremitting chime, but he left the headlights on as he came back out to stand beside me.

  “So,” he said.

  “So,” I agreed.

  He turned on his phone’s flashlight app. “Let me take a look at your neck—” I lifted my chin. “—yeah, he got you. But not by much. Hurt?”

  I held up a finger. “The angelic feather cut hurts worse.” I blotted gently at my neck, but found only a smear of blood on my fingers. “So he wants Greg for some reason. Some very important, highly personal reason. And we have now been deputized to find her and bring her to him despite the fact we have no clue where she is or how to do this.”

  “Sounds ’bout right to me.”

  “It’s the Arizona version of ‘Hotel California,’” I said. “The whole checking out but never leaving thing. Because I am fucking confused by everything, and we are on a dark desert highway.”

  Remi scratched at the back of his neck. “Somethin’ more to ask Grandaddy, I reckon. Not only about Cassandra and Ambriel, but Shemyazaz and Ambriel.”