by Jenn Stark
Instead, he gasped, his hands coming up so quickly that Angela flinched back. “What?” she demanded.
“No—shhh, wait…” His words were barely more than a whisper, infinitely gentle, and that, perhaps more than anything, convinced Angela to remain still as his hands settled on either side of her face. She gaped at him with wide eyes as he brought her chin up, his gaze finding and holding hers.
“There is more that you want to share with me,” Gregori murmured, and Angela’s expression softened, a smile flickering to life on her lips.
“I’d say we just shared an awful lot—even if…” The smile slipped away again as quickly, a furrow of surprise forming between her brows. “Why can’t I remember the details?”
“I don’t know,” Gregori said frankly. “It’s been far too long since I’ve attempted more than a conversation with anyone other than the Syx. I don’t know what is ordinary.”
“The who?”
Gregori shook his head. “There’ll be time for that, later. Right now, I need you to focus on this moment, my eyes. Let me see what you want to show me.”
“I—” Angela cut off her own protest as her gaze lifted again to Gregori’s, and she drew in a startled breath, but she didn’t break eye contact this time. Instead, she lifted her hands to cover his, gripping them tightly. “I don’t know what you want,” she finally said, but that wasn’t true either. Gregori could see the initial slip of her control as tears rose in her eyes and spilled over her lashes, trailing down her beautiful cheeks. She appeared not to notice, caught in the thrall of his gaze, but with each tear, a part of the wall she’d so carefully built and reinforced for so long crumbled.
The first wave of pain came after that, so much outrage and despair that it turned Gregori’s bones to ice. It was all he could do not to rush the process, but this course couldn’t be rushed. Humans were both infinitely strong and shockingly fragile. They could endure the most incredible pain for weeks, months on end, and then, years later, the slightest word or snatch of song or even a scent could send them into a downward spiral of madness. He knew he couldn’t push Angela beyond the precipice of her own control. She needed to be the one to take that step. She needed to be the one to willingly fall back into the embrace of her memories. He knew it—and she knew it too.
The fact that she was willing to try to do exactly that humbled Gregori and drove him to push his own discomfort away, his own panic at the way his senses were expanding, opening, absorbing her pain as it cascaded over him in sheets.
“It hurts,” she finally gasped, and Gregori breathed out the softest sigh he could manage.
“I know,” he said. “But it must be your choice for me to help you. I cannot take what you won’t give.”
Angela nodded quickly, several times, as if she was ratcheting up her own inner fortitude to continue breaking down the wall. Her breathing became little more than a racking sob, and her hands clutched Gregori’s, clammy with sweat.
“I remember,” she managed, the words brittle with pain as the tears stopped and her eyes widened, incandescent with horror. “The day they came for me. That was what I couldn’t understand, how I’d let this happen, how I’d been so stupid, so foolish to be in a place where strangers could abduct me without my parents realizing it. I was eight. I knew better than that. I knew!”
Gregori stayed quiet as Angela railed on, making no indication that she had started speaking not in the cool, measured tones of the junior congresswoman, but in the heated rush and querulous tone of an eight-year-old girl yelling at herself. Her entire body was shaking now, but there was no more fear left. It was all anger and indignation, directed inward.
She hated herself for what she believed she’d done, releasing demons into the world willfully and without outside help, and that hatred was worse than any pain Gregori had ever endured. God’s children were not made to hate, and especially were not made to hate the perfection of their own creation. That emotion was beyond anything the Father had ever intended, a byproduct of the free will He’d so carelessly and beautifully bestowed on mortal souls. But as Gregori’d had the opportunity to learn over and over again through the past six thousand years, any gift can turn into a weapon in the hands of the determined, none more so than the gifts of the mind.
“I should never have opened the book again,” Angela seethed. “I knew what was in it, I hadn’t forgotten everything about what happened to my grandmother. I’d known that something terrible had happened because I’d opened that book and I knew something terrible would happen again. I knew it! Yet I couldn’t stay away, wouldn’t stay away. My parents never realized I kept track of their anthropology collections, offering to help them shelve and sort, not because I was kid of the year but because I wanted to know where those damned books were at all times. They were like a drug to me, and I didn’t even understand what drugs were at that age. I only knew that if I kept track of where they were and didn’t touch them, then everything would be okay. Until the day that I wanted to touch them. Until the day that I wanted to open the book. Until the day…”
She blinked, focusing on Gregori once more. “I wasn’t kidnapped that day in the university library. The school had never been at fault. Later, I made up the story of getting hit and blacking out. That’s not how it happened at all. It happened because I opened the book.”
Gregori grimaced. “You were only a child,” he said, though his words were barely audible. He didn’t want to stop the flow of Angela’s confession, but she was degrading quickly. Her energy practically curled at the edges in horror and self-recrimination. He didn’t need her information so badly that he was willing to risk her mind.
Then she began speaking again. “I was a child, but I wasn’t a fool,” she said bitterly. “I knew what danger lay within those pages. But it didn’t matter. I had taken to stealing the book out of my parents’ collection and carrying it around with me. I told myself it was just to prove that I was stronger than it was. I didn’t believe in evil. I didn’t believe in darkness. I was a privileged daughter of two professors, and knowledge was nothing more than words on a page and thoughts in a mind, both of which I controlled. That’s what I told myself. I was wrong.”
She shuddered and tilted her head into Gregori’s left hand, as if to draw comfort from him. But he couldn’t give that comfort either. Not yet. Anything he pushed out toward Angela would serve as its own sort of wall, shoving her memories back into the dark hole out of which they were only now surfacing. He needed to let those memories pour forth, no matter how difficult it was for her. And no matter how the pain was tearing at the demon beneath his body, flaying it open, laying it bare.
“That day in the library, I convinced myself it was my own fear holding me back. That I was fascinated with the book because I’d turned it into sort of a bogeyman, giving it a power it didn’t deserve. After all, I’d seen my parents open it a million times. Open it, read from it, translate it—laugh over it. The superstitions of another time, another place. The first time they did it, I about fainted with fright, but nothing ever happened to them. Nothing ever happened to Nana again either. No one seemed affected by the book at all, except me. And I wasn’t going to stand for that anymore. The book had no power over me.”
Once again, Angela had slipped into the outraged tones of a defiant eight-year-old, anger still winning out over the fear, but not by much. Gregori spread his fingers ever so slightly along her cheek and temple, drawing out her emotion the same way a medicine woman might draw poison from a wound. Angela’s eyelids drooped, but she continued to hold his gaze as once more, tears slipped out between her lashes.
“They came after that,” she whispered. “I had the book open, was even reading it, bathed in the sunlight coming through the large bay window. I could see the quad beneath me, the students laughing, talking, doing whatever they always did. I was safe. My parents were just around the corner in their own reading room. The library was full of adults. I was safe. They came anyway.”
It was all Gregori could do not to ask the questions burning in his mind, but fortunately, Angela kept going.
“The same spell pulled them too,” she said, her lips curving into a mocking smile. “I knew it the moment I stumbled upon it, the moment I even turned the page. I remembered. All those symbols and strange words that somehow, I’d figured out how to say. Not perfectly, but perfectly enough. Even as a little five-year-old girl. I’d learned more Serbian in the intervening years, not even realizing why. And this time when I read the words, I understood what they meant. It wasn’t simply a bunch of vowels and consonants, there was a flow to the spell that made sense to me. And as my eyes raced over the page I realized it was a summoning spell, one of the many my parents had chuckled over, even sometimes reading aloud. They read them aloud!”
Her face reddened, and her eyes shot wide, fixing Gregori’s with a glare. “What is wrong with me that when I read the words, terrible things happened, but when they read the words—when anybody else read the words—nothing happened? What had I done? What is wrong with me?”
She pushed on, saving him the need to comment. “I don’t know when I actually started speaking the words. Somewhere in the middle of the text, probably, but the change happened almost immediately. I don’t think I got out more than a couple of lines before the sun seemed to dim, the kids on the quad seemed farther away. Everybody seemed farther away. I was sitting in a bay window, and there were miles and miles of books all around me, corridors leading away that were far too long for me to ever run down. Then they were there. Demons. Like what you turned into. Like that…man, in the field. Oh my God… Could they actually be…”
She said this last with a sort of detachment that indicated she was no longer aware of Gregori, but searching deep within her own mind. “Horned and scaly with slavering tongues, drool dripping onto the floor, their bodies broken and disjointed. They stood around me and seemed surprised that I was afraid. I didn’t realize at the time they could make themselves appear as normal people. I didn’t realize a lot of things. Then there was a swift, sharp pain in my neck…and then it all went dark.”
She blinked, refocusing on him. “The rest I’ve already told you in some way or another. They held me for eighty-seven days in a cage, they brought me out and showed me all these people, who started out normal but who changed, they would always change, turning into the same hideous creatures that I’d seen in the library, seen in my own house. Sometimes I would attack them, sometimes I would cry, sometimes I would scream. And they hurt me. Never sexually, never like that. But they struck back when I hit them. They’d bite and tear. And though I was always the one who ended up with broken bones, I think I caused them pain as well.”
Angela slumped back on the couch, and Gregori held her a moment longer, until it was clear that the fugue of her confession had passed.
“Thank you,” he murmured, waiting for the moment he needed. The opening she hadn’t given him yet.
“I’m just…so tired,” she sighed, her lids drifting shut. “I’d just like…I’d like the pain to go away.”
And that was all he needed.
Kneeling as he was on the floor in front of her, it wasn’t difficult at all for Gregori to bow his head and lift his hands so that his thumbs grazed his forehead while his smallest fingers rested lightly on Angela’s forehead, his hands clasped together in prayer. He was no longer a Fallen angel. He was no longer gifted with the grace of the Father to heal the most deeply broken of his children. But he remembered this much. After all the millennia of pain and punishment, he still remembered this. His great and mighty wings would spread wide as he took their pain from them and drew it into himself, suffering their agonies, crying their tears, lightening their hearts so they could be refilled with the purest gift accorded to any of His creations—love.
“Please.” He offered the ancient plea not in English anymore, but in a language he hadn’t spoken in six thousand years. The whispered, rustling, lyrical speech of the angels of God Most High. “Please. Bring this child peace.”
And so it was done.
This newest wave of agony was by far the hardest to endure, and Gregori reared back even as Angela slumped onto the couch, passed out. He turned away from her, staggering several feet as fire and molten steel wrapped his entire body. He collapsed to the floor, his arms outstretched, and screamed in silent agony, racing through his mind, his memories, the universe itself until he reached a place where nobody could hear his cries.
And then, he wept.
19
Angela watched Gregori worriedly across the dining room table. An emergency meeting of her congressional committee had been called for later that morning, and ordinarily, that’d be no problem at all. But ordinarily, she hadn’t just slept for fifteen hours straight and woken up feeling…completely reborn.
As good as she felt, however, Gregori looked like he’d been hit by a bus. He stared out into nothing, not even seeming to notice that Hellboy was on his lap, pressing eagerly against Gregori’s hand. Gregori awkwardly patted the dog, his hand moving jerkily as if he’d never touched an animal before, but Hellboy didn’t seem to mind. He eyed Angela from beneath Gregori’s fingers with an earnest “don’t interrupt him” vibe.
She pursed her lips together, but couldn’t help herself. The other animals, having been returned by Joe very early this morning, hadn’t ventured out of their bedrooms in the back of the condo yet, but she knew that wasn’t going to last. “You sure you don’t want to try this coffee?” she asked Gregori.
Gregori started, glancing down in utter confusion at the dog wriggling beneath his hand before refocusing on Angela. “I don’t drink coffee.”
“Well, maybe it’s time you rethought that plan. Because you definitely need it.”
That at least drew a grim smile from the man, but it was fleeting. His brows were drawn together in a fierce scowl, his jaw was set, and, worst of all, he stopped patting the dog.
Hellboy glared at her, but Gregori wouldn’t meet her eyes. He tried, but he kept flinching away, as if she’d become disfigured. It’d gotten so bad after she’d first awoken that she’d thought she had been damaged, and had fled to the bathroom to make sure.
But she looked the same—better than she had in awhile, actually. She knew it wasn’t simply because of all the sleep she’d just logged.
The silence dragged between them as she drank more of the incredible brew Gregori had somehow conjured up, a recipe she would absolutely be dragging out of someone before this day was over. It hurt her heart to see Gregori in such pain, knowing she’d caused it. He’d healed her before—but this was different.
“You weren’t so damaged last time,” she finally said, and Gregori’s shoulders sagged. She realized he’d been trying to keep the truth from her, but if this was his example of a poker face, he’d never make it in Vegas.
“This time was more complete,” he acknowledged, almost as a confession. He glanced up at her again, unable to keep from flinching. Hellboy’s little head whipped from side to side as he tried to understand the fraught energy bouncing between them. Angela thought she heard the tiniest mew, but she didn’t dare look away from Gregori.
“You’re—you remember now,” he said.
Her brows went up, and she stopped her spoon midway between her coffee cup and the table, then set it down more deliberately. “I remember,” she agreed. She wasn’t sure at first what he meant by that, but the obvious choice was that she remembered her past. The past that she’d deliberately buried for so long, it had lingered only as a hazy set of images wrapped in darkness and shame.
Only…now it didn’t.
“It’s all there, now.” She lifted her hands to the table, pressing them against the hard wood. She felt a movement at her leg, and glanced down—Domino was rubbing against her, while Old Sir eyed her soulfully from the kitchen door. She didn’t see the rest of the crew, though another plaintive mew sounded from somewhere behind Gregori.
Angela refocused on he
r hands, bringing them together in front of her. Everything seemed to take far longer than it should, as if she was watching herself in slow motion—everything except her mind, that is. She raced through her thoughts and memories, images and flashbacks from when she was very small, and it was all simply there. All of it uniform, all of it real, all of it accessible. The joyful memories seemed masked in a soft, hazy glow, while the terrible memories were dimmed only slightly by a gentle, cool peace.
“How did you do that? How is it I’m not afraid anymore?”
Gregori shifted, and Hellboy reluctantly jumped off his lap, though the small dachshund didn’t go far. “It’s never the memory that’s the true horror, no matter how shocking or perverse the act that drove the memory deep into your subconscious. The human capacity to endure pain, surprise, even the madness and chaos in front of them knows no bounds. The trouble comes from the emotions you attach to those experiences. If you build up enough positive emotions around a situation, it becomes impossible for you to separate the truth from the illusion, for the heart to detach from the moment and move on. Build up enough negative emotions regarding a situation, and it becomes intolerable for the brain to process, the mind to understand, the heart to heal. These are defense mechanisms put in place to keep the fragile balance of the mortal spirit, until such time that enough distance has occurred between the event and the current moment to allow that healing to begin.”
“I shouldn’t have buried those emotions away so deep, the memories and everything I had attached to them,” she said gravely. “But I did. And then I couldn’t bring them back. Until you.”
“It’s what I do,” Gregori said simply. He glanced down, his brow furrowing. “Ouch.”