Cover Him with Darkness

by Janine Ashbless

  “Justice!”

  “Animals retaliate. God dispenses forgiveness. In the human realm, Milja, all we have is justice.”

  I was scooped through the door, my toes dragging on flagstones. “That’s not justice, you twisted fuck!” I screamed.

  “If not,” he said, bringing up the rear and eying me with equanimity, “then I trust and believe that Almighty God will forgive me.”

  I lost it. I broke my cable-tie and twisted in my captors’ arms and stuck a finger as hard as I could in someone’s eye and kicked and screamed and punched.

  Like I said, I’m not an action-movie heroine. I might as well have fought a host of archangels, for all the good it did. All that happened was I got slammed against a wall hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and punched several times, and ended up on the floor throwing up my monastic breakfast.

  The world spun around me, blooming dark and light as I tried to focus.

  I could hear Egan shouting.

  “Get up,” said Father Ilija in a gruff voice, grabbing my clothes between my shoulders and pulling me so hard that the fabric seams creaked and snapped.

  “Stop it! Stop it! I’ll tell you!” It was Egan’s voice, almost cracking with the strain of his bellow. “I’ll tell you how to catch the angel! I know how to do it!”

  Slowly his words sank in. By the time I was on my feet, dangling from Father Ilija’s fists, Father Velimir was staring through the hatch in Egan’s door.

  “What?” he demanded.

  “I know how to catch him! I’ll tell you! And it will work, but you must keep her unharmed—you need her!”

  What on earth is Egan up to? I wondered groggily.

  “How do you know anything about this?”

  “Vidimus.”

  The word meant nothing to me, but Father Velimir frowned. “Open the door,” he grunted.

  The cell was as I remembered. Egan stood, straining against his handcuff chain, eyes wide and fixed on me. “Don’t hurt her,” he gasped, “or I swear you can go burn in Hell before I tell you.”

  “Talk,” said Father Velimir. “You’ve got thirty seconds to convince me you know anything at all.”

  Egan talked, quickly. For about thirty seconds. In a language I didn’t know at all—but the word Vidimus was repeated.

  Latin? I guessed, flailing inside. I could feel the world slowly crumbling away beneath my feet.

  “Get him out of that,” growled Father Velimir. Whatever it was he’d heard, it had made him angry—coldly, grimly angry. Two priests went forward: they seemed practiced at what they did. One got Egan bent over in a headlock, his free wrist twisted up behind his back, while the other unlocked the cuffs.

  “Did you know?” Father Velimir turned to me, his voice soft, one eyebrow raised. For a moment he reminded me strongly of Uriel. “Did he tell you where he was taking you? Do you know who he works for?”

  “A bank. He works for a bank.” My lips felt numb.

  “You idiot girl.” The words were loaded with bitterness.

  I looked into Egan’s face as they forced him upright. “You told me you worked for a bank,” I whispered.

  “I’m so sorry, Milja,” he said, shaking his head, his gaze slippery with shame. “Mentalis restrictio. Technically, yes…I’m on their payroll.”

  “Tell her.”

  Egan looked sick. “The Vatican Bank.”

  chapter thirteen

  THE CAGES

  Extraordinary. You almost got her out from under our noses. And once in Rome…your people would have taken possession of the Watcher, wouldn’t you?” A muscle twitched in Father Velimir’s cheek. Suddenly his head snapped sideways, like a hawk fixing on a mouse. “Put her in his place.”

  Clamping a hand over my mouth, Badger-Beard bundled me onto the mattress and secured my wrist in the steel handcuff, all before I could think straight.

  “We have a change of plan, for the moment,” Father Velimir told me. “Now he’s ready to talk, let us see what he does know.”

  “Milja,” said Egan urgently. “Don’t lose heart: you’ll be okay.” Then they pushed him out into the corridor and the door clanged shut on the sound of the priestly party retreating down the passage.

  Okay? Okay? How was I going to be okay? As I knelt there on the mattress, panting, with bloody tears smeared down my cheeks, I had never felt less okay. My body was sending up distress flares of pain from all the places they had roughed me up. I could feel my split lower lip swelling with every thump of my racing heart. And I could feel the raw hole in my belly that was left where the warm core of trust had been torn out.

  Egan was Catholic. Of course he was. Of course. I should have seen it, shouldn’t I—an Irish mother and, judging from his surname, a Polish-American father? And he’d crossed himself the wrong way round, left to right, as did, come to think of it—I could see it right now in my mind’s eye—motherly Jelena…in the second of the “safe houses” he’d taken me to. Houses with crucifixes, but no icons.

  His network. His “friends.” His inexhaustible bank account.

  Quoting Job. And Dante’s goddamn Inferno.

  Appearing out of nowhere in Podgorica, just when I needed his help. He must have been following me.

  “Peter sent me.”

  The Vatican? Dear God…

  How long had they been watching me?

  If I had any excuse for not recognizing the obvious, it was because I’d never really met any Catholics, so far as I knew. There are hardly any here in my homeland—most fled over the border into Croatia in the 1990s—and certainly none in our village. I suppose I’d probably bumped into some in America, but I’d never been near a Catholic church or discussed religion with fellow students or work colleagues. My personal experience of Catholicism was on a par with that of Moonies and Hare Krishna devotees.

  I just hadn’t thought.

  But now it seemed only too clear.

  He’d sought me out deliberately, from the beginning. He must have. Planting the seeds, inveigling his way into my trust. A handsome guy it was easy to like. So that when everything went wrong and I needed someone to turn to, he was there—a shoulder to cry on, a strong arm to lean upon. It must have been like a gift to him.

  He’d known all along, I realized, sliding farther down the slope into my pit of despair. He’d known about Azazel. It had taken no leap of faith at all for him, when I’d tentatively confessed that I’d freed a fallen angel—I’d just assumed, quite wrongly, that he was struggling to believe me.

  It explained why he took the whole story so calmly.

  It explained everything—including the way he acted around me, as if he were wearing some sort of invisible chastity belt. I was, as far as he was concerned, contaminated goods: the girl who’d consorted with devils.

  He’d played me from start to finish.

  Dear God—had he picked my pocket, back at Logan? Had he taken my passport just so we could meet?

  He hadn’t been my friend. He’d been my courier.

  Smuggling me back…to Rome. Where they’d be waiting for me with a nice cozy cell in Vatican City, no doubt. Much like this place, in all probability.

  I put my free hand to the pit of my stomach, pressing hard, as if I could fill up the empty space inside, as if pressure would stop the hurt.

  He’d seduced me. Not into bed, sure—but into trusting him and liking him. And risking everything for him.

  I’d come back here and given myself up to the men who hated me, for him. For a man who had intended to betray me all along.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and let out a whine of pure pain that somehow went on and on. Then I bent right over and pressed my face into the mattress and mouthed his name, over and over, like I was trying to vomit something from the back of my throat. I didn’t care about being overheard. The pain overwhelmed everything else.

  I cried tears of blood. It hurt, but it was better than not being able to cry at all.

  And when, in the depths of my blame an
d my self-loathing I mouthed Azazel’s name too, I didn’t think, at first, what the result might be.

  They’d promised to throw the switch if I summoned him.

  I opened my eyes. My heart ran like a fast engine. I raised myself from my sticky fetal clench and looked around the room.

  He wasn’t there.

  I wondered if the guard was listening from behind the door, a sweaty finger on the button and his heart in his mouth. The hatch was closed.

  I could call him. I could call Azazel. I could beg his help. And maybe he was still listening, despite our last fight. Maybe he’d come and snatch me away, in the twinkling of an eye, if only to prove to us both that he was right and I was wrong.

  But more likely the guard would press the switch, and the monastery electrical supply would surge through the cuff and my body, and then I’d twitch and smoke and fry. I’d seen that kind of death in American movies. It looked agonizing.

  I looked up the length of my arm at the pipe and the inert furnace. I wanted to be brave. I wanted to defy them all.

  But I was too afraid.

  And I didn’t trust Azazel. I didn’t trust him to be fast enough. I didn’t trust him to care.

  I knew then that I was wholly on my own.

  I was tethered to that metal pipe for five days.

  I could stand, or kneel, or lie down, and I could swing round to use the plastic waste bucket, but I couldn’t so much as walk around the room. I made myself stand for hours, just to keep my legs working. I made myself do push-ups and squats. I made myself eat and drink everything they brought me.

  I had a lot of time to rage—at myself, at God, at Egan and Azazel and the priests. I had a lot of time to regret. I had a lot of time to think about the things I’d been told.

  I had time to recall my recent dreams, with their portents and significance.

  Perhaps I understood, in my captivity, a little of how it must have been for Azazel—though I had none of the physical pain to bear that he’d had, and though my butchered children were no more than notional possibilities. I lay there in the fluorescent glare, eyes open, and imagined his agony.

  And in the end I understood, I thought, his fury with me. Why he’d lost it, up there on the roof of my apartment.

  You are not God!

  Sometimes, the priest had said, He commands those who love Him to wield the knife. It is the ultimate test.

  Abraham, ordered to butcher his only child.

  The God that Father Velimir worshiped was very much the same as the one Azazel rebelled against, it seemed to me. The Pantocrator: the almighty, all-powerful king. An absolute ruler, never to be questioned, and one who demanded not just obedience but extraordinary proof of it.

  Lying there, staring at the wall, I thought I understood at last what Azazel had reacted against. “If you really loved me you’d… Save Egan. Do what I tell you. Obey my commands. Fall down in worship. Stay away from all women. Slay your own son.” I’d spoken carelessly, assuming a right to command him. But the kind of “love” that demanded obedience, that set tests, that attempted to exert control in its own name—it must burn him like acid.

  I hadn’t thought.

  “You are not God!”

  Azazel’s experience of divine dominion would be enough to drive anybody insane.

  That wasn’t my God though. That wasn’t the God my father had taught me, in our simple little house or our lonely church. Father’s God was one who manifested through the world in intimate passionate love for all His creation. “Closer than your own heartbeat,” Father had said to me. “More affectionate than any friend, more just than any ruler, more loving than any father, more a part of us than our own limbs.”

  Father’s God was infinite Love.

  Except…except that my gentle, musical father had been a jailer and a torturer too. He had obeyed his calling, out of Faith. He’d not had the answers, so he’d trusted to a higher authority. He’d let God—or custom, or history—make the decisions.

  The dismaying possibility occurred to me that the difference between my father and Father Velimir was not one of kind, but only degree.

  That night, I dreamed of Azazel.

  I was somewhere dark, and it was raining. It wasn’t falling directly on me, but on a tin roof over my head, and the noise was insistent and ominous, like the roll of drums at an execution.

  Lightning cracked the sky. A pale glare reflected off the sheet of mud that covered the earth and was already filling my shoes. I saw Azazel, soaked to the skin and with his filthied white jumper hanging off his shoulders like a flag of surrender, leaning against an outer post of my shelter, barely under the protection of the corrugated metal roof. He had his back to me. I saw buildings farther away across the flooded stretch of earth—drab buildings patched together out of tin and wood and thatch and mud, and I wondered how they ever held up under the onslaught of this sort of weather. I saw other things too, on the ground, but I didn’t want to look at them.

  After the lightning, darkness once more. But I could pick out Azazel’s form silhouetted against the reflective sheen of the earth.

  “Azazel?”

  He hunched a shoulder. “And now you’re following me. Come to gloat?”

  “No.”

  “Come to beg my forgiveness?”

  That was a lot closer to the mark. I said nothing, and he turned so that he could look at me. That red glow of his eyes from the shadows made me shiver. “Where have you been?” he asked.

  The reek of alcoholic spirits rolled in like a wave. He had a bottle in his hand; I could make out its outline as my eyes adjusted to the night, and I could hear the slurring of his words.

  “Are you drunk?” I asked, quietly appalled.

  “You going to tell me off?”

  “No. I just…didn’t know angels could get drunk, that’s all.”

  “And you’re such an expert on angels,” he said sourly.

  I bowed my head, stung.

  “Where’ve you been? Where are you, Milja, when you’re awake?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  He bristled. “I’m not omniscient!”

  “But I’m on holy ground. It’s a monastery.”

  “And I told you before: I have no connection with the Christ-cult.”

  I frowned. “But I thought…holy ground is public domain. I mean—that’s what Uriel said. He said you could overhear everything said on holy ground.”

  “Uriel?” He snorted, and took a swallow from the bottle. “That’s what that kiss-ass told you?”

  I nodded.

  “Uriel has made few friends, in his position. If he was worried about being overheard, I suspect it wasn’t by me.”

  Unease pricked my insides. “His position?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “What’s that, exactly?”

  Azazel waved the bottle. “He’s the Accuser. The Adversary.” He peered at me as if trying to read my reaction, and shook his head. “Well, last time I knew him, anyway. His job is to uncover dissension within the Court of Heaven. Secrets and sins among the Sons of God. He sets traps. Keeps us on the straight and narrow.” He hunted for words. “Like an internal police force, you know?”

  “No, I didn’t know.” I’d found Uriel arrogant, snobbish, vain—but quite humorous, in his way. He made me nervous, but I hadn’t really disliked him.

  “Well stay out of his way. If he can think of a way to get at me through you, he’ll do it.”

  Too late, I thought. Way too late. I’d played right into Uriel’s hands, I was starting to suspect.

  “Unless that’s what you want,” Azazel added grimly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You want me locked up again?”

  “No! Azazel, no!”

  For a moment his prickly, defensive stance held, and then he relaxed a little. “Then what do you want, Milja?” he asked.

  I want you to save me. The words sat on my tongue, and I could neither spit them out nor swallow them down. “
If Uriel came up against you, what would happen?” I asked, deflecting the question.

  He shrugged with drunken over-expressiveness. “He’s an archangel, but no warrior. It’s all yap yap yap with him. I could take him apart.”

  “Good,” I whispered. But what if Egan was right in his boast? What if there was a way to trap one of the Fallen?

  I moved toward him. “Azazel, do you know what vidimus means?”

  “In what language?”

  “Latin?”

  “We have seen.”

  Of course, I thought. I had, after all, heard those words before. “But what does that mean? What is it?”

  “It’s an old word for a sketch-plan for a stained-glass window. Why do you ask?”

  I wasn’t sure. But the phrase had occurred and recurred in my dreams long before Egan spoke the words out loud. Something about it creeped me out.

  “Just something someone said,” I answered weakly. If Azazel didn’t know about Egan or how he’d betrayed me, I didn’t want to tell. My shame was too bitter, and Azazel would only laugh at me. It was better he didn’t know.

  Lightning went off like a flashgun. It lit Azazel’s tall form—all angles now, all lines of starvation, his eyes pits, his collarbone stark above the bloodied line of his top. It lit the miserable little village. It lit the things sprawled in the puddles. I cringed.

  “What is this place? What happened here, Azazel?”

  “It’s a bear village.”

  “A what?”

  “A bear village. They go out into the forest around here and they catch bears. Black ones with a white blaze on their chests. They bring the bears back and they put them in cages, really tiny cages where they can’t turn round or stand up or anything, and they stick an open tap through a puncture-wound in the walls of their bellies, into the gall bladder, and they harvest the bile, drip by drip. For fake medicine.” His sullen growl shifted to an almost childish delight. “I set the bears free. They were hungry. I told them they could kill anybody they liked.” He looked around us, tipsily bemused. “What a mess.”

  “Oh Christ.”

  “One more time: nothing to do with him.”