Cover Him with Darkness

by Janine Ashbless

  “That’s not fair! My father was doing his duty!”

  “His duty by whom? By what authority did he lie and steal and dissemble and stoop to simony? Your family do not even know who set the task upon them! It was not just sin piled upon sin, but a terrible risk. And now look: look what you’ve done, Milja. Your lust and your weakness have released a scourge upon the world. A supernatural evil such as has not been seen since the days of the Flood.” He shook his head, heavy with sorrow. “One we must fight to contain once more, by any means necessary.”

  “I didn’t mean to…” I mumbled.

  “And yet you must take responsibility. Or else the entire world will pay for your crime. Already your friend Egan has suffered terribly on your behalf.”

  He stopped abruptly. We were in a long narrow corridor, illuminated by fluorescent strip lights, that I suspected was underground. There were rows of heavy, ancient doors on either side, suggesting small rooms, and in fact most of them had open panels near the top. Monks’ cells, I guessed. Outside one of them a man in civilian clothes sat on a folding chair, reading a newspaper. He shot to his feet as we approached, looking like he was glad to be relieved of his boredom.

  “Here he is,” said Father Velimir, signaling to the guard to slide back the viewing panel in the door. By standing on my tiptoes, I could look into the room beyond. I glimpsed a piece of large, static machinery—a boiler or a generator or something—and a single mattress on the floor next to it. Egan sat on the mattress, his head nested against one raised shoulder and eyes closed. It was hard to see the detail, but from the crook and the angle of his arm it looked like he was cuffed to one of the machine’s pipes.

  Egan, I moaned silently, my heart pounding. I turned to my captors. “Is he all right? Have you hurt him? Let me in there! I want to see him.”

  “And you can. But bear this in mind: we have rigged the metalwork to which he is bound,” Father Velimir said, taking something out of a pocket in his cassock: a small black remote, like a TV controller. He didn’t sound like he was issuing a threat; he sounded sad and gentle. “Be very clear about this, Milja. If you should try anything, and in particular if you should call your master, we will run several thousand volts through that pipe and it will kill your friend stone dead.”

  “More like crispy fried,” muttered the guard, with a grin. Father Velimir ignored both my appalled look and the man’s crassness.

  “Do you still want to go in?”

  I nodded, wordless with fear and outrage.

  “Open it.”

  The cell door had a shiny new padlock on the ancient latch. The hinges yielded with a creak. The prisoner’s eyes were open by the time I stepped in, and he was rising slowly to his feet. A steel handcuff scraped up a length of pipe. His right wrist was tethered.

  “Egan?” I lurched across the room.

  “Milja? Why are you here?” His voice was hoarse, his eyes wide. I closed enough to step onto the mattress and lift my bound hands to his face—bruised, haggard, unshaven—and he swept his free arm about me, crushing me to him, pressing his face to my hair. I could hear him panting and I could feel the bang of his heart against his ribs. “Milja, Milja,” he groaned.

  “Are you hurt?” I choked. “Are you okay?” He smelled sweaty and sour but I didn’t care: just to be in his embrace was a staggering relief. I pushed away enough to look up into his face. “Oh God,” I moaned.

  His nose had been broken, and I remembered the blood all over his face, on the boat. The red split mark across the bridge hardly stood out against the rest of the darkening bruises, but I felt cold run into the pit of my stomach.

  “What have they done to you?”

  “What are you doing here?” he countered, looking beyond me to the doorway. “They caught you too? How?”

  “Oh Egan.” My hands slid over his chest, pushing at the edges of his misbuttoned shirt. I could see raw red patches on the upper part of his chest. A glance at the hand cuffed to the pipe showed me that his fingers were roughly bandaged and that he was missing at least two nails: the raw nail beds were bright and glistening. Impulsively, I caught his face as well as I could between my hands and kissed his cracked lips. The arm around me tightened. I could feel his body, hard and urgent and aching for release, against mine.

  He groaned, shaking.

  And then I realized: this was what I had dreamed.

  The shock of recognition was enough to push me backward out of his arms. We stared at each other wildly. I could feel the race of my blood, the ache of inextricable pity and lust in me that responded to his duress and his captivity. And I could see him trying to master himself.

  “Milja,” he repeated, clearing his throat.

  It wasn’t precisely the same as my dream, of course. Egan was handcuffed, not chained, and his arms were not spread. He was wearing more clothes. But it was close enough for me—for both of us—to know. I saw the shame and the fear stark in his eyes. It nearly wrecked me.

  “What have you done to him?” I shouted, turning my back because I could not bear to see the way Egan looked at me, and could not cope with wanting him right now, and did not dare face up to my horrible prescience.

  Father Velimir stood in the arch, hands folded.

  “What have you done to him, you bastards?” I rasped.

  “You seem fond of your accomplice.” He spoke in English for the first time, and I followed his lead.

  “He’s not my accomplice! He doesn’t know anything!”

  “So he tells us.”

  “None of what I did had anything to do with him—he came along later—he was just trying to be nice to me!”

  “How often do men fall into that trap?” Father Velimir said, sighing, but it was definitely not a question. “Your demon master has taught you the arts of seduction. That was his specialty from the beginning, after all.”

  I wanted to laugh in his face—me, seductive?—but it just wasn’t funny. I held to the important point: “It’s not Egan’s fault. You have me, like you wanted, so let him go.”

  “Or else?”

  “Or else?” I was starting to panic. “For God’s sake! Are you going back on our agreement now? That’s not right!”

  “A minor sin, some would say, in order to prevent a greater evil. And offhand, I cannot think of a greater evil than Azazel.”

  “Then you’d better not screw us about!” I spat.

  “Enlightening.” Father Velimir smiled thinly. “I’m not going back on our agreement. I just wanted to see how long it would take you to resort to threats, that’s all.”

  I opened my mouth—and then shut it again. He had me.

  “Look at it from our point of view, Milja,” he said gently, opening his hands. “You’re not a stupid young woman. I’m sure you see the logic. If I let your friend go now, there is nothing to stop you calling your master to take you away again, just like you did on that boat. Or killing us all, at your whim.”

  I shook my head, dizzy. “I don’t kill people!”

  “The boat sank, Milja. Five men drowned. Besides the one with his throat torn open.”

  “Oh,” I said, sickened.

  “So you see: as long as we need you, we need your ‘friend’ Egan. When we have done what we need to do, then he will go free, and no further harm will come to him. Or to you.”

  The fear-sweat was gathering in my pores like acid. “How long?”

  “A few months, I imagine. Preparations need to be made.”

  Months? Months?

  Egan spoke up for the first time. His voice was rough and hard. “What are you going to do to her?”

  Father Velimir grimaced. “We will need her, in due course, to summon her master so he may be bound again.” He lifted a hand and beckoned to me. “Come here.”

  I cast Egan another glance, hoping that he had something to say, some argument that would change everything. But he only nodded, gnawing his lip, so I followed the priest out into the corridor, wondering if my legs would hold me up mu
ch longer. I’d looked no further than freeing Egan—I figured that Azazel was capable of taking care of himself. To have that goal pulled away from me into an unforeseeable future was unbearable.

  “Let us be clear, Milja. If your master comes here before we are ready for him, your friend will die first. And if you flee or turn against us, he will die. So you must cooperate in everything we ask of you, however much you might wish otherwise. If you do that, your friend will live and go free.”

  I swallowed, though my throat had gone dry. “This is just so wrong, so sick,” I said huskily. “Can’t you see that?”

  “You think we should lie down and let evil go unchecked?” Father Velimir drew himself up. “That would be easier, wouldn’t it, than fighting back? But I’ve lived under tyranny, Milja. I’ve survived wars. I’ve seen the evil of men run wild, and I’ve witnessed genocide and mass rape, the destruction of holy places and the death of countless innocents. If that’s what mere men do, how much worse your master?”

  I stared at him, helplessly. The weight of history in this part of Europe was too great to argue with. The last of the post-Yugoslavia wars had finished only in the late 1990s. I remembered well the horrific reports I’d heard as a child. It was over now—but none of it was forgotten.

  “If it’s true that Azazel is such a threat, Father,” I said, licking my dry lips, “then answer this—Why hasn’t God Himself taken action? In the Book of Enoch he sent the archangels to bind the Fallen. Why hasn’t He done that this time? Where are St. Michael and all the heavenly host? Why doesn’t He act?”

  Father Velimir snorted. “Why doesn’t God act? Oh child—you think you’re the first person in history to ask that question? You think they didn’t ask it in Jasenovac and Auschwitz? It is the eternal question—but tell me who you are, to sit back and demand he clean up the mess you made? In mankind, in us, is the meeting-point of the spiritual and the material realms, Milja. When God acts, He acts through us. Your role, like mine, is to obey. Do you understand?”

  I looked back at Egan. He had braced his shoulders against the wall in order to stay on his feet, and his look of despair was undisguised. That sight of him nearly broke my heart.

  “Okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  “Excellent.” With something like a flourish, Father Velimir handed the black remote box over to the guard, while a priest closed and locked Egan’s door. “You can stay down here for the moment,” he told me, pointing at a room on the opposite side of the passage. “You’ll be comfortable enough, I think.”

  The cell opened up for me was at least properly furnished as a room, not just a boiler house. There was a single bed, an icon of St. Basil on the wall, and a scarred writing desk and chair. But it was windowless and spartan and the sight of it made me shake.

  “No,” I said, trying to back out and getting a shove for my efforts. “Wait. Not yet. I need the bathroom.” I wasn’t lying either—it had been a long drive up into the mountains.

  “See that she gets a bucket,” Father Velimir told Father Ilija, with a grimace of distaste.

  Then the men filed out and the door closed, and I heard the clunk and rattle of a padlock being applied to my door. I went over to the bed and sat on the hard mattress, staring at the whitewashed brick.

  The first thing I did when I’d managed to gather my scattered wits was to take the chair over to the door and climb up to look out through the hatch. I could see the corridor, our guard reading his paper—and through Egan’s matching slot, into his cell. I couldn’t see him though.

  “Egan?”

  “Milja,” he called. “What’s going on? How did they find you? I thought you got away!”

  “I came back.”

  “What the hell for? How could you be so stupid!”

  “Well you’re the stupid one, if you think I was going to leave you,” I said, my throat swelling.

  There was a moment’s silence, and then, “Milja,” but the syllables were broken and painful.

  “It’s me they want, Egan. You’re just their guarantee of my good behavior.” I couldn’t remember how much of our conversation had been in English, or work out how well Egan understood the situation. “When they’re done with me, they’ll let you go. He said.”

  He promised me. I held on to that hope with slippery fingers, though by now I knew perfectly well how principled men could always find an overriding reason to act like bastards.

  “You shouldn’t have done this, Milja. I was trying to protect you! You should have just stayed away…”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head though he couldn’t see it.

  The guard, irritated by a shouted exchange in a language he almost certainly couldn’t understand, stood up and approached me. “Get down and shut up,” he ordered. “Or I come in there and I break your teeth.”

  I got down.

  I shut up.

  I spent a while gnawing through the cable-tie until it held only by a tag; I hoped that it would snap easily if I really needed my hands free. Then I lay on my bed for hours, thinking. Imagining what might happen if I broke and begged Azazel for help. Imagining what might happen if I didn’t. Remembering what Uriel and Father Velimir had both said to me about suffering and the importance of obedience. Recalling my strange vision I’d had on the playa—only a few hours ago, but half a world away. Everything churned around in my head, mixed up.

  They kept the lights on all night but I still had my wristwatch and it was after three in the morning when I suddenly realized what it was the priests wanted from me.

  I understood.

  I wish I hadn’t.

  Loki.

  I sat up, sweat running across my skin, and shoved my fingers into my mouth to stifle the noise bursting from my throat.

  I spent the rest of the night pacing up and down my tiny room, unable to sleep, wishing I could cry just so as to relieve the pounding in my head.

  They brought us breakfast the next morning, and it was surprisingly good—fruit and bread and cheese and ham. They even brought me a bowl and lukewarm water to wash in.

  An hour later Father Velimir paid a visit, with an entourage of priests that included, to my discomfort, the priest with the gray-striped beard that Egan had knocked cold in Vera’s hotel bedroom. He still carried a greenish bruise on the side of his head and round his eye, and he looked at me from that swollen socket with cold dislike. Father Velimir, on the other hand, looked furious.

  “You’re not pregnant!”

  I wasn’t the least surprised at his accusation. I recalled the red-faced trip to the drugstore in Podgorica, and the removal of the covered bucket of pee from my cell this morning. I glared at him from my seat on the edge of the bed, red-eyed with sleeplessness and loathing.

  “No,” I said clearly, speaking English so that Egan could understand, if he was listening. “I’m not pregnant. Has that screwed up your plans? No half-human baby that you can murder and make into rope.”

  Father Velimir’s mouth dropped open. I kept talking.

  “And that’s the only thing that’ll hold a fallen angel, isn’t it? Chains won’t work, ropes won’t work, stone cells won’t work—they can probably teleport out of set concrete for all I know. They were tied up using bits of their own children. And that’s what you want from me, you piece of—”

  He jabbed a finger in my face. “Why? Why aren’t you pregnant? You fornicated with him, didn’t you? You lay with him!”

  “Hell yes.”

  “Then his seed is in you!”

  My words hissed out between my bared teeth. “What century are you stuck in, Father Velimir? Progestogen coil. Itty bit of plastic. I’ve been wearing one for years.”

  He flung up his hands. “Ah—what should I have expected? The God-given instincts must be dead in such a breast!”

  “My instincts?” I snarled. “You were planning to kill a baby! How does that square with your Godly conscience, eh?”

  “It is written of the Fallen: The murder of their beloved ones
shall they see, and over the destruction of their children shall they lament. It’s the will of God, girl.”

  “Not my God,” said I vehemently. “My God is Love—He doesn’t tell us to kill children.”

  “Yet He told Joshua to do exactly that to the Canaanites. He told Abraham to do it to his own son. He slew all the firstborn of Egypt. Sometimes,” said Father Velimir, with a look of dignified sorrow, “we must do hard things for the sake of obedience. Sometimes He commands those who love Him to wield the knife. It is the ultimate test of our devotion.”

  Something stirred in my memory, but I did not have time or the wit to chase it down. I was too flabbergasted.

  “Go fuck yourself, Father Velimir,” I said.

  It wasn’t exactly theologically astute—but then how can you argue with True Belief? Anyway, at those words the gray-bearded priest stepped in and struck me across the face so hard that he nearly knocked me off the bed. I scrabbled at the blanket, drooling with shock, my ear ringing—and my eyes burning with tears, at last.

  No, not tears.

  “Look at her,” said someone in hushed horror as I struggled to sit up again and turn a defiant face to them. “Look!”

  Confused, I wiped at my wet cheeks. All of a sudden the back of my hand was red.

  “Tears of blood! What’s wrong with her?”

  “Is she a tenatz?” someone else asked anxiously—referring to the vampires of local folklore.

  “Hush!” Father Velimir signaled for calm. “Her flesh has been corrupted by his demon seed. Enoch has warned of this: And the women of the angels who went astray shall become sirens.”

  Sirens? I thought dizzily. What the hell?

  “In which case,” he added grimly, “perhaps her own flesh will do just as well as her Nephilim child’s. Since we have no other option now. Bring her.”

  “What? What?” I started to shout. “You said you’d release him!”

  He caught my face as his priests hoisted me to my feet. “Don’t be afraid, girl. We don’t want to kill you. Your legs will probably do. We need ligaments, sinew, skin… Look upon it as blood money for the men you have killed. Justice.”