The Wrong Enemy

by Jane Lebak

  God asked if Sebastian wanted a gift. And Sebastian replied with a request: he wanted to want to forgive.

  Rachmiel closed his eyes and reached for Tabris, realizing only then that he had dropped back from the prayer framework when they’d opened up. Battened down, he hadn’t felt Sebastian’s request. Rachmiel couldn’t tell if it was his own feelings or Tabris’s or Sebastian’s, but he kept sensing desperation: when he was alone, then he’d break down, then he’d cry. Maybe for weeks, but not now. And he couldn’t sort out whose feelings were whose any longer.

  Below them the water kept ramming into the rocks. Casifer invited Tabris into the prayer.

  Tabris pulled back, but Casifer insisted. This time Tabris stopped praying at all, not even with words. Casifer looked up long enough to glare at him, and Tabris glared back.

  Rachmiel touched Tabris with his wing, and Tabris projected into Rachmiel’s heart, Not now. He didn’t want to shatter in pieces in front of Sebastian and the new guardian.

  Rachmiel let him go. Casifer emitted an air of disgust.

  When the boy was ready, Casifer transitioned him back from an ecstatic state to his normal level of perception. Sebastian shook, and he rubbed his hands on his arms, as if grounding himself in his own form. “I could have stayed that way forever.”

  “When you’re capable, you’ll have that all the time,” said Casifer. “That’s the Beatific Vision. Angels have that level of awareness and higher.”

  Tabris watched and said nothing.

  Sebastian’s mouth opened. “And you can still function? What’s your prayer like?”

  “We meet God soul to soul, not just face to face,” said Rachmiel. “It’s a more total union.”

  Casifer added, “When you’re ready, God will take you into Heaven, and then the experience will be easier for you to bear—and eternal. Your capacity will deepen and your endurance will become greater. But first you’ll need to complete your development.”

  In mid-nod, Sebastian’s eyes widened, and he held his breath, clenched his fists. Casifer started, and the shock went right through Rachmiel: Sebastian realized that if he’d lived his full life, the experiences, suffering and choices he made during his lifetime would have changed the facets of God his soul was capable of seeing. His relationship to God would have deepened, and so would his experience of the Divine.

  The rage blew from Sebastian like steam venting from a volcano, and he glared at Tabris.

  Rachmiel moved between Sebastian and Tabris. “Thank you for visiting.” He couldn’t get Sebastian to look at him, and the boy shifted sideways to keep glowering. “Will we see you again soon?”

  Casifer sounded shaken. “I’m going to leave that up to Sebastian.”

  Sebastian glared at Rachmiel, and when Tabris moved closer, he stared away. “Thank you for agreeing to see me.” His voice was a wasteland. “I’ll let you know if I decide to see you again.” He turned to Casifer. “Let’s go.”

  Casifer took Sebastian’s hand, and they returned to Limbo.

  Twenty-Two

  Tabris stood straight for a moment, then turned toward the ocean.

  Rachmiel couldn’t read any feeling off him. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m thinking... No, I’m not all right.” He picked up a rock and hurled it across the water. Rachmiel altered its trajectory so it wouldn’t reach escape velocity. “I’m not all right, and I won’t ever be.”

  He sat at the cliff’s edge, swinging his legs so his heels hit the loose stone without dislodging any.

  Rachmiel sat beside him. “It’s going to take time.”

  “Time?” he snarled. “Time is my enemy. Immortality is a curse. It certainly is in Hell. One mistake, and I’m wearing a scarlet M for all God’s creation to see.” Tabris rubbed his forehead. “How nice for Sebastian to have a travel-agent angel with an iron-clad itinerary.”

  Rachmiel said, “Casifer wanted a plan in case things got awkward.”

  Tabris wasn’t listening. “And that child is so angry there’s no way he can keep controlling it.”

  “Just like you.” Rachmiel looked at the waves. “But he’s young yet. He doesn’t have your control.”

  Tabris put his face in his palms. “I didn’t teach him that.”

  Rachmiel shook his head. “What’s under his anger?”

  From Tabris: irritation; a reprimand about playing psychologist; the boy didn’t have to have anything underlying the anger.

  Rachmiel said, “Is he ashamed?”

  “Stop it!” Tabris angled away from him. “Don’t push. Let me get my head together.”

  “Maybe you need to let go just once? It’s unreal to deny that much—”

  Tabris flashed back ten feet from the edge. “But not here, not with you. I’m going somewhere alone—”

  “—so I don’t have to see what you’re really like inside?” Rachmiel followed him, and before Tabris realized, Rachmiel had him pinned the way Mithra had shown him: he wouldn’t disappear this time. It was simple enough as long as he concentrated. He’d just never imagined he’d need to use it on a friend.

  Tabris struggled. “Let me go! You already know everything—you already know I’m the kind of angel who’d put my hands around a child’s neck and snap it when he hit the ground—what more do you want? You know it all, and I’m never going to be the same—not with you, not with God, not with—”

  Tabris went still. No thoughts, no emotions, no words.

  Rachmiel said, “Not with Sebastian?”

  He didn’t relax his hold. One flicker and Tabris was out of there.

  “Or is it with yourself?”

  He might as well have been talking to a tree. Tabris couldn’t escape, so he was locking down on the spot—not what Rachmiel had intended. He pushed. “You haven’t lost Sebastian completely.”

  Rachmiel caught a stray feeling: he’d lost Sebastian’s trust and any hope the kid would ever like him; whatever remained wasn’t all that much.

  Rachmiel said, “God loves you.”

  Tabris said, “God tolerates me.”

  They stayed that way during a silence Rachmiel couldn’t figure out how to break—two angels on a cliff against the speckled dome of the sky: the peacemaker, a son of God, and another who mourned and would not be comforted. Things couldn’t stay that way. “You know about the prodigal son.”

  Tabris folded his arms. “Do you have the expanded director’s cut anniversary edition, where the older son goes in to the party and kills the younger son? I do. Let me go and I’ll get it.”

  Rachmiel said, “In my version, the younger son got the fatted calf.”

  “And in mine, the older son got chewed out.” Tabris bowed. “Allow me to introduce the older son. And the other stories in the collection are just as exciting: the lost sheep, devoured by wolves. The lost coin, buried.”

  Rachmiel frowned. “I don’t think it works that way. You’re the younger son in as many ways as the older. And you could be the coin God finds. You could be the sheep he carries home on his shoulders.”

  Tabris’s shoulders slumped. “How can you say that?”

  “He’s forgiving.”

  “Only if you’re human. Lucifer was never forgiven.”

  Rachmiel huffed. “He never asked.”

  “Neither did I.”

  Terror flitted through Rachmiel, as if God might snatch Tabris off the cliff’s edge right now. “Don’t you want forgiveness?”

  “Of course I do!” Tabris’s voice broke. “But I deserve the worst He can give. No prayer, no child, no friends—I could never ask forgiveness because I can’t balance all the scales.”

  “God can.”

  “Can, sure.” Tabris turned his head. “But under the rules He’s set, no. He can’t make Sebastian fulfill His plan in the way only Sebastian with his background and his personality could have. If Mary had said no to Gabriel, would he have gone door to door? No one could have mothered Jesus the way she did, and no one else can be Sebastian.” Tabr
is closed his eyes, and Rachmiel got an image of withered flowers. “And now Sebastian doesn’t get to be Sebastian either. He’ll never go to college, hold a job, get married. His potential children no longer exist. His future wife will either stay single or marry the wrong man. Why don’t we track down her guardian angel and see what he thinks?” Rachmiel got another image from Tabris: a series of ever-expanding circles on a pond’s surface. “Over time, the repercussions are infinite.”

  Rachmiel said, “Many people die before their time.”

  “Not murdered by their guardians.”

  “Well, no.” Even from a distance, the tension of unshed tears crawled over him like spiders, so he kept his voice soothing. “God’s plan is more dynamic than that anyhow. You’ve heard about free will, I assume?” He forced a smile, but Tabris didn’t settle. “He took bad choices into account. Sebastian’s parents and friends, yes, worry about them. But not the wife, not the potential children. We aren’t cast in roles, and there’s no script. When we improvise, God rewrites the play and doesn’t keep forcing us back into the abandoned channels. So Sebastian’s intended wife can still marry, and it’s not going to create a chain of divorces and children who should never have been born.”

  Tabris said, “You’ve thought this through. Why would—”

  Rachmiel didn’t react fast enough. Tabris shot toward him, and until the moment he tackled him, flames in his wake, Rachmiel had been concentrating on keeping Tabris from escaping. He took the hit square in the chest.

  Tabris towered over him, sword in hand. “You lied to me! You’ve been lying in every way that mattered!”

  Back against a rock, Rachmiel raised his hands. “She’s going to be fine!”

  “I killed her husband! You knew it! Everyone’s been watching this charade of me protecting her when you knew I hurt her in the worst way possible!”

  “I never told anyone!” Rachmiel wanted to project calm, but he couldn’t reach it past his own fear. Energy pulsed off Tabris, betrayal and rage, but beneath both those frothed hatred. Rachmiel knew absolutely that first Tabris was going to strike him, and then he was going to damn himself. And for that reason, when Tabris struck, Rachmiel didn’t defend.

  God made Rachmiel incorporeal like light. Tabris’s sword swept through him and lodged three inches deep in the stone.

  Petrified, Rachmiel could only watch. Tabris heaved up his sword and swung again, but he could no more hit Rachmiel than a dust cloud. The sword was useless now, but with a heart that couldn’t be shielded from emotional weaponry, Rachmiel cringed under the force of that anger.

  More fire than angel, Tabris opened his heart at Rachmiel: projected into him the blaze of his anger, his disgust, his fury at everyone who stared at or mistrusted him and the simultaneous sense that they were right, right to be disgusted, right to want him gone. The despair. The hatred. Hatred of the one at the center, the one who had ruined it all.

  Rachmiel curled around himself, unable to fight a lightning strike of emotions that left a crater behind. A world in ruins because of him, of him, of him.

  When it ended—and Rachmiel had no idea how much time passed before it did—he found himself still clenched on the ground.

  Silence. No, not silence. Birds.

  A breeze through leaves.

  Waves whispering.

  Elizabeth? Was she okay?

  He asked the ground where he was, and he felt the cliff, the land’s edge. The same spot. Next he probed for other angels but felt no one. He opened one eye, then the other. It hurt. Elizabeth. He had to get to Elizabeth.

  He raised his wings and pushed himself up, only to find Tabris sitting against a rock a wingspan away. Watching him. Emotionally void.

  Rachmiel froze in place halfway up from the ground. They stared at each other: kindness and truth, Compassion and Free Will. Rachmiel wanted nothing more than to leave, to flash to Elizabeth and Guard her room until Tabris promised never to return. The fear clamored on the surface of his heart and Tabris would feel it, but he didn’t care anymore what happened to Tabris or if Tabris was sorry. He’d forgive him someday. Right now he just wanted him gone.

  Rachmiel sat up as slowly as he could. All the emotions Tabris had discharged into him...they echoed: the despair, the anger, the self-hatred. That last was what rebounded within Rachmiel most often, a deadly pinball with an unpredictable ricochet.

  When Tabris spoke, it was low and slow. “Now that you’re awake, I’m going to get Voriah and leave you forever.”

  Rachmiel shook his head.

  “I’ll take myself off your hands. I’ve already gutted Elizabeth’s future. I killed Sebastian. And now I’ve hurt you. You have a child who needs you.”

  “So do you. Don’t leave.”

  Tabris’s eyes were lightless.

  Rachmiel tried to find words, but everything kept forming up as Tabris’s latent I hate myself.

  Tabris stood.

  “Don’t! That doesn’t solve the problem.” Rachmiel put his hands to his eyes. “You’re still on probation. I’d leave her myself before I sent you to Hell.” He looked up. “I mean it. Stop talking about leaving.”

  If Tabris didn’t, Rachmiel might well agree to it. I hate myself. A little venom spicing up the emotional waters. But he hadn’t damned himself yet, and he’d been on the cusp. All those emotions he’d let out—they’d harmed Rachmiel but bought Tabris time. Time and rational thought. Small consolation.

  Rachmiel pushed to a stand, regretting it the instant he tried. His vision swirled.

  Tabris grabbed him before he toppled. “You’re still hurt?”

  “Obviously,” Rachmiel snapped, trying to get his balance enough to push Tabris away. He closed his eyes against the glare of the daylight and then realized—Daylight? And who knew which day’s light it was?

  “Same day,” said Tabris. “You were out maybe six hours.”

  Rachmiel tried to stand on his own, but when Tabris released him, the vertigo took him once more. He dropped back to a seat. Don’t panic. Just get your strength back and then you can leave.

  And in his mind still, the aftertaste of self-hatred. The chalkiness of despair. The thorniness of rejection.

  Rachmiel muttered, “I should have let you go. I stupidly thought I could help, but I’m only a nuisance.”

  As soon as he said that, Tabris burst with a projection of shame. He was sorry. He shouldn’t have reacted that way. He wanted to be forgiven. He wanted to make it right.

  Tabris opened wide to let Rachmiel feel his apology. And as he did, Rachmiel bundled up that aftertaste of self-hatred and pushed it back to Tabris like an unpinned grenade.

  Rachmiel was half-in and half-out of Tabris’s heart, a heart open to apologize with full contrition, and the instant that grenade got inside, Tabris struggled to clamp shut, but Rachmiel stayed put. He kept Tabris’s attention on it. Why? Answer me. You wanted to make it right. I want an answer.

  The urge to pull away tornadoed through Tabris and into Rachmiel, and then with an act of will, Tabris showed himself.

  Murderer.

  Rachmiel looked past that, but Tabris shoved it front and center again.

  Rachmiel slipped around that label and moved into the feelings, each like a beast chewing through its cage: the guilt; the anger; the resentment toward the angels who mistrusted him and the anger against the ones who pretended to understand.

  And then at the back of them all, the wall he’d built around God.

  Rachmiel let Tabris give it all to him, and etched into every bit of the way Tabris perceived himself was hatred. He’d ruined everything. Everything. Everything.

  Rachmiel gave him time to get calm, and then he kindled a light within Tabris’s soul. It doesn’t need to be so dark in here. This spiritual anorexia gave the perception of control, but as Tabris starved himself, his spirit was crumbling. Let me see what you really are.

  And there, behind the resentment was need. Behind his anger at himself was conscientiousness. Behind the
loneliness was empathy. The wall around God was only a wall around himself, and inside was someone who’d lived to please his Father.

  Rachmiel beheld the whole of Tabris’s heart, the places that still shone and the open wound where he couldn’t reconcile forgiveness with the damage he’d done. The purity still gleamed there beneath the control and anger.

  Oh, wow, Rachmiel thought. You’re so beautiful. And on top of that, I love you.

  Tabris started. “But I hurt you!”

  I was hurting you too. Rachmiel looked again at the glory of God in Tabris’s heart, suppressed but there, definitely there. It was so similar to the glory God had placed in Sebastian’s heart and so different from the Godly light in Elizabeth’s. Facets of God, spread out over separate souls. This soul, hand-crafted by God, wasn’t after all just tolerated by God. It was loved. Loved for who he was: dutiful, conscientious, clever, brave, goal-oriented, and honest. An angel who weighed his decisions and measured his worth by their outcome.

  As Rachmiel beheld him, he perceived images without knowing why: sunflowers, children, Ferris wheels, fish, and opals.

  Tabris trembled around him as Rachmiel reached another dark area. He tried to shine on that, and Tabris recoiled.

  Okay, not there. But he kept going, admiring Tabris’s architecture from both inside and outside, and he congratulated God on yet another masterpiece. Inside Rachmiel, inside Tabris, God said thank you.

  As if he sensed that, Tabris tried to push Rachmiel out, denying that God had made him specially. He was just one of a trillion angels, named T-A-B-R-I-S like an alphabetical serial number.

  Rachmiel projected a refusal.

  Tabris put a dark thing into Rachmiel’s heart. A scary thing. Hatred. The times he’d wished himself in Hell.

  Rachmiel’s eyes widened. Why?

  The self-hatred thrummed again in Rachmiel’s heart: in Hell, it would be justified.

  Rachmiel grieved.

  Tabris pushed another scary thing into Rachmiel’s hands: proof that God didn’t love him.