Metal Angel

by Nancy Springer

  At the beginning of time, the Supreme Being had sat on his throne and emanations had issued from his right side and from his left. The ten emanations of his right side came to be called the Princes, or the Sarim, or the Archangels; they were the Holy Sefiroth, the most ancient and powerful and ineffable of angels, more puissant than seraphim and cherubim, older than the world. And the ten emanations of his left side came to be called the Adverse or Unholy Sefiroth, and they were the Angels of Punishment, more ancient and potent than Lilith or Lucifer and all the minions of hell.

  They all had many, many names, as was fitting for such puissances, for the foundation of power is the Word, the name. Each Sefira had hundreds of names, only a few less than the thousand names of its creator. And the names of the angels of the Unholy Sefiroth meant “destruction” and “death” and “wrath of God” and “whip of flame,” “pitiless” and “rigid” and “rod.” The one to whom Volos needed to speak, the fourth personage of the Unholy ten, was called among other names Mashhit, which meant “death of children.”

  The less Mashhit was annoyed or inconvenienced, Volos knew, the better were the chances he could be cajoled into letting Michael Bradley live. Therefore, to summon Mashhit, Volos went to where Mashhit’s presence already hovered strong: the Intensive Care Unit of the hospital, where Mikey lay unconscious.

  It was after midnight. The monitors glowed at the nursing station, but the cubicles stood quiet and dim, labyrinthine in the shadows.

  Angela walked before Volos, his psychopomp, leading him through mysteries. She was with him, she had told him, because he needed her to get him onto the floor. There were rules. He knew that, and he knew the rules were eyed mostly by those passing them by; she was not permitted to be in the ICU in the middle of the night either. It was one of the sweetest things about living with humans, the way the rules were there for bypassing, one of the things that made the world most unlike the bitter place from which he had come.

  If any bitterness at all tainted his mouth, it was because the nurses would not have let him in without her. She was the mother, but he was the weird one with wings. He had seen them watching him.

  He knew also that Angela would have come with him regardless, and that particular knowledge tasted like honey and made him brave.

  “He’s here,” Angela said to him in a low voice, “isn’t he?”

  “Mashhit? Yes.” The death angel’s presence filled the place, towering through the ceiling, passing through the walls so that the shadows overhead loomed like the spread of great dark wings.

  In his bed Mikey lay, a white, broken fledgling, bedraggled and still. Angela went and sat by his head, laying her hand over his. Volos stood at the foot of his bed, centering himself so that the axis of boy and bed and his axis were one, making himself symmetrical and straight as a candle flame in a windless place. Flame was his courage. Darkness all around it was his fear.

  “Mashhit,” he said quietly. It was best to be calm and quiet with Sefiri.

  Nothing happened except that, although the lights did not dim, the darkness increased.

  “Mashhit,” Volos invoked, lifting his hands in a priestly gesture that dated back to the Druids. “I, God’s rebel servant, call upon and conjure you, spirit who slays without pity, by the most dreadful names: Soab, Sabaoth, Adonai, Jehovah, Elohim, Tetragrammaton, and I do exorcise and command you by the four beasts before the throne—” It was hard to keep the volume down. Fear kept twisting the knob. “—Mashhit, come to me peaceably and show yourself to me in a mild human shape without any deformity, and do what I desire of you. Now, without delay.”

  Before he could say the Latin words to complete the incantation, the darkness that hung below the ceiling of Mikey’s cubicle shifted, and sifted down, and stood in approximation to the floor, taking the form of something that loomed man-shape and was black and wore chains made of black fire. Its wings were like those of a bat, like a doomster’s storm-whipped cape, passing fleshlessly through walls. It filled the room. Its presence was huge. And its face was that of Mercedes.

  “Mercy,” Volos whispered.

  “Yes, you had better beg for mercy. Fool.” Mashhit sounded dangerously peevish, like Richard Nixon at his very worst. In fact, much like Mercedes.

  “I meant—” Volos let it go. He had never stood so close to a Power before, and the nearness was fearsome. He felt himself shaking, felt the room swaying. By all means let Mashhit think he had cried out for mercy.

  “Thumbsucker. Infant.” The specter’s voice was cold but offhand. “You fancy yourself a hero, summoning me?”

  “I summoned you …” Volos closed his eyes a moment, feeling the small flame of his courage go out, clenching his fists as if they could catch it. “I summoned you because I want you to let this child live.”

  “You do.” Mashhit had not moved, but sounded more than ever mocking. There was a trick in his tone.

  “I want Michael Bradley to live, and be well and happy, and grow old before he dies, and I want nothing bad to happen because of his living …” Trying to cover all the loopholes, Volos faltered. There were too many contingencies in the life of a mortal.

  “Want, want, want.” This was a game, and in a vicious way Mashhit was enjoying it. “Is it of consequence what you want? And do you want to be a martyr? Are you offering yourself in his place?”

  If it had been a matter for hatred and fire and wrath, Volos could have handled it better. If there had been lightning he could have matched it with lightning, red fire with red fire, rage with rage. But it was all cold words and black wings, sullen indifference and a far-too-familiar scorn. Mashhit’s cosmic contempt came to him on a bedroom scale. It was a petulence worthy of his former lover that he faced.

  He whispered, “No.”

  “Good. Because I would not have accepted you, inchoate thing. Have you no idea what a botched job you are? A jury-rigged half-souled make-do? With wings of no more use to you than a cooked turkey’s? Your mind is in your crotch, and you think that makes you human, but you are deluded. There are feathers on your back, and you think that makes you divine, but you are wrong. You are neither thing, you have not been able to choose, and you have failed at both. And you think of yourself as a rebel? Fool. You are just a runaway slave. Less than a scullery knave. Your worth is so small, your disobedience so insignificant, that the Supreme One cannot even be troubled to smite you.”

  Words are unaccountable things. Friends can speak lies, yet out of the mouths of enemies, hard and sharp as a raptor’s bill, can come truth of a sort. Listening to the rantings of Mashhit, Volos heard such truth, and it stunned him. He tried to move his lips, but it was no use; words were power, and he had none. He could not speak. He could barely stand unsupported.

  “Now, Volos with Half a Soul, it is time for you to fail at being a savior.”

  The Prince of Punishment moved a stride nearer, and Volos only just managed not to step back from him. Mashhit’s presence was no longer pettish or indifferent. Now he filled the room with tangible darkness and unmistakable menace. His wings lifted, obscuring walls and ceiling so that shelter and safety became only illusions, so that in this room there were only death and Mashhit. His hands lifted, and they were tipped with black claws.

  “Step aside, dolt. Yonder child is mine by right, and you cannot deny me.”

  Volos found that his beloved body was a traitor, a renegade out of control, a reprobate, limp and impotent in the presence of Mashhit; if he had put any liquid into it recently it probably would have wet itself. So this is really fear. Physical fear. He hated it.

  He did not step aside, but what did that small defiance matter? In a moment he would fall.

  “No!”

  A strong voice. He wished it were his, but he knew it was not. This was the voice of a powerful entity, a voice with no hint of pleading in it, only anger and the grace to command. Then to Volos the world was made of relief and terror. How could he have forgotten how fearsome she was, the one who had come there wi
th him to sit by her sick baby’s side? It was she who had forced him to obey her when he would not obey God. It was Angela Bradley.

  And she was on her feet, she had placed herself between Mashhit and her child like a she-wolf between the hunter and the den. “No,” she ordered, “you shall not have Michael. Go away, Mashhit. Find some other prey.”

  “Well,” said that personage in a soft, startled voice, and this time it was he who stepped back. “Well,” he managed to add after a moment, “eternity is full of surprises.”

  “Did you hear me?” Angie spoke imperiously, as if to a balky child. “I said go.”

  “I hear, Lady of Angels, and I obey.” The specter bowed his towering head. The face he had borrowed from Mercedes melted away, leaving only shadows behind. As if blown to tatters by a strong wind, he vanished and was gone. Volos could tell he was gone utterly. After Mashhit had left it, the small benighted cubicle seemed full of air and light.

  In his white bed Mikey stirred and started to cry.

  Volos understood enough about children by then to know that crying, when for too long there has been only silence, is the most welcome of good signs. He stood shaking and hanging on to the wall as Angie kissed her child and tried to quiet him and sprinkled him with warm, glad tears. As medical personnel came hurrying from several directions, brushed past a useless thing with wings, exclaimed over the patient, hugged the mother, and shook hands with each other. As Mikey struggled against the tubes and wires that had been sustaining him, and his wail grew to a full-throated, rebellious bellow of self-will.

  “Volos!” Angie remembered finally that he was there and came toward him, making him claw even harder for support because he felt his knees giving way under him, he would bow a suppliant before her again, his terror of her equaled the wonder and awe he was supposed to feel before the Throne.

  “No,” he whispered. “Please.” Not even sure what he meant. No, please don’t let me make a total asshole of myself… no, please don’t be the one against whom I must rebel … no, please don’t leave me.

  She put her arms around him, and her embrace made him feel stronger, yet weak as water. He stood up straight, but held on to her with trembling hands and laid his head on her shoulder.

  Angie had long since noticed one of the wry facts of life, that joy, even surpassing joy, lingers no longer than a butterfly, while problems and troubles settle into place like stones. At the time of Michael’s healing she had felt as if she could never be unhappy again, but by midway through the next day she was haunted by shadows.

  One of them was Volos. Wherever she went, to the hospital, her hotel room, the room where Gabe was staying with the roadies, the coffee shop—wherever she tried to find peace, he was following close to her side, very quiet, ashen under his dun skin. Even his wings were pale. Something had upset him as much as it had upset her. His anxious presence annoyed her more than comforted her, because he wanted some kind of reassurance, and she wanted the same thing herself—from somewhere. Still, she found herself dragging out the motherly questions.

  “What is it, Volos? What’s bothering you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “There’s something, I can tell. What is it?”

  “Nothing, really, Angela. It is just that I am still shaking.”

  It was only a half-truth, and she knew it, but that was his problem. Maybe he was missing Texas, but if he could not say so, it was not up to her to tell him. He had not mentioned Texas at all since the blowup, and Angie had decided rather perversely that she would not bring up the subject unless he did. Once upon a time she might have tried to help him, but now she felt too thin and taut to help anyone.

  Frightened. She had frightened herself badly, bullying Mashhit as she had done—not because of the results, which had been all she wanted, but because of the implications. It appalled and terrified her to find that she was so much like her father. She knew Daniel Crawshaw had power, and charisma, and a gift for righteous wrath; she knew he had the ability to speak with spirits. He called it praying. She called it cursing. And the last thing she wanted in life was to be anything like him. Since leaving him she had made up her mind that she was not the one going to hell: He was. Someday God would send him to hell and shut him and the devil in a room together, and God only knew which one would come out.

  She stood at the window of her hotel room, feeling a need for sunshine, wanting to go outside and walk. If it were not for Volos she would have done just that, and maybe walked away some of her terror. But Volos could not go out on the streets with her, could not go anywhere in daylight without attracting frenzied fans. And she did not feel she could just walk out and leave him behind.

  Volos … if she was Lady of Angels, then everything she felt for Volos needed to be rethought. Her life now was made of implications and contingencies. There was too much not being said.

  Sitting on her bed, Volos mumbled to his hands, “I am a coward, Angela.”

  You’re not the only one. But she did not say that. Instead, because she felt she must, she left the window and sat by his side.

  Volos said, “It is a good thing you were there to deal with Mashhit. I could do nothing. I could barely stand up. If there was anything in me I would have shitted myself.”

  She touched his hand. Though she felt nothing except great weariness, she made herself be gentle with him. “You were the one who saved Mikey. I could never have summoned Mashhit. I didn’t know it could be done.”

  Volos told his knees, “I knew before I summoned him that he would make a soft-on of me. It would have been surer and far safer if only I could have made myself pray.”

  Then within a heartbeat she was no longer making herself be gentle to him, but felt herself full of tenderness to her soul, all of it for him, because she understood. She said, “You couldn’t make yourself do it.”

  “No. But I should have.”

  “It’s okay.” I am a coward too. She held his hand in both of hers but looked at the window as she said, “When I was trying to call Ennis, I knew I should have called my father as well. He loves his grandchildren. But I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I hate him.”

  “You are lucky. Hate makes it easier.”

  She turned to stare at him, feeling once again separated from him by a distance the touch of their hands could not bridge. Feeling far too much on her own. “You don’t hate what you call father?”

  “I think—I told myself I did. Hating was a place to hide in. But lately—thinking of praying—thinking of talking with him …” He let the words trail away.

  Yes. She did understand some of this after all. Because with her hand on the warm plastic of the telephone, dialing Ennis, she had suddenly wanted to say more to him than just “Your son is very sick, you’d better come.” She had wanted to ask him how he’d been. She had wanted to see his brown-eyed, ordinary face. Knowing that it would be wordless and full of an anxious love for her, like that of a large dog waiting on a doorstep. Knowing that he would come to her at once and almost without question if she called him. Wondering if he would kiss her and tell her he loved her. Wondering if he had changed.

  She was still wondering.

  So much had happened so quickly that Volos did not know on what hook to hang his pain. All he knew was that once upon a not-very-distant time there had been three who loved him and knew him truly: Texas, Mercedes, Angela. Then Texas had shouted hateful things at him and gone away, not coming back. And Mercedes—Volos knew there was something deeply wrong with Mercedes, knew that if he, Volos, had any human sense he should send him away as well. Yet he knew he would not do it. There had been enough bitter leave-taking already.

  Now Angela—there he sat on her bed, not sure whether she would let him lie in it with her again, not sure of anything about her, like a child afraid to let her out of his sight, yet afraid to talk to her, to tell her any of the true things on his mind. She was the Lady of Angels. She was one who could, if she chose, make him do anything. Mak
e him come to her, make him go away again. Make him lie at her feet like a worm on the pavement after rain.

  She terrified him.

  He adored her.

  How was he to trust her not to enslave him? He had trusted Texas, and look what had come of it. He had trusted Mercedes, and—there was too much to think of besides Mercedes, who was a small, small man. He had trusted Angela, and thus far she had not betrayed him, but …

  She was staring far away.

  He pressed her hand. Out of the midst of his fear he blurted, “Angela. Ange. Please. Do not leave me.”

  At his words she turned her head and met his pleading gaze. Her eyes were large and dark and calm, like those of a pietà, transcending pain. She said, “I’m carrying your baby.”

  chapter sixteen

  Ennis had learned a lot from Metal Mag and Star Gazer, not all of it about rock music. But what seemed most useful to him was what he had learned about Mercedes. There had been considerable information, at first because Mercedes had taken every opportunity to be interviewed, trying to elevate himself by clinging to Volos’s wings, and later because the gossip columns would not let go of him. He wanted a career of his own, the insiders said, and Volos wasn’t going to help him get it. He was jealous of Volos’s new (female!) lover. Only his expensive nose habit and Volos’s sentimental willingness to tolerate him kept him with the winged star.

  Also from the rock music magazines Ennis learned the itinerary of Burning Earth’s tour.

  Therefore on a Saturday night, late, on one of the sleaziest streets of a Pennsylvania city that had three times been flooded under just like the sinning earth of Noah’s day, Ennis waited. As Volos rocked the concrete of the Johnstown War Memorial Arena and Angela stood backstage and mouthed the words along with him, Mercedes left the arena, as Ennis expected he would. The road manager, spurning his high perch amid the lights, was heading for a corner where his low-life instincts told him a drug dealer would pass.