by Sara Reinke
“I can’t get it out of you,” he said, and at this, Jason idiotically felt dismayed tears well in his eyes, and his breath hitched as he struggled to contain them.
“It’s a part of you now,” Gabriel said, limping to the fridge and pulling out a bottle of beer. Propping the door open with his hip, he slipped a bottle opener with a magnet affixed to the back from the side of the refrigerator, then popped the cap with an audible hiss. He titled his head back and drew the Heineken to his lips. His Adam’s apple bobbed steadily as he proceeded to gulp down the beer.
When he was finished, he gasped, a mixture of satisfaction and the need for air. Drawing his hand to his mouth, he glanced at Jason and blew a soft burp against his knuckles. “Where’s Samantha?”
“Asleep in the living room,” Jason said. “Or…at least she was.”
Looking curious, Gabriel crossed to the doorway and glanced into the adjoining room. Here, he saw Sam still curled on the couch.
“What about the other one?” he asked. “The one with the”—he flapped his hand to indicate his head—“skunk stripe in her hair.”
“Mei went to the hospital,” Jason said. “The doctor who helped you, removed the bullet from you, he said for us to come, he’d give us some antibiotics for you.”
“Antibiotics?”
“You’re hurt,” Jason said. “The bullet perforated your intestine. He was afraid you might develop some kind of infection.”
For the first time, Gabriel managed a smile, a quick chuckle. He knocked back the last of his Heineken, then tossed the empty bottle into a nearby waste can. He reached into the fridge and pulled out another bottle, tossing it to Jason. “Here.”
He took another for himself, let the door swing closed, then shuffled toward the living room. “Come on,” he said. “It’s time for Letterman.”
****
Jason carried Sam into the bedroom at Gabriel’s instruction, laying her gently against the mattress. She stirred groggily at this, but drifted off again within moments after Jason smoothed her hair down and offered her a reassuring kiss.
After that, he sat with Gabriel on the couch and watched The Late Show as if it was no more than an ordinary evening and they were no more than a couple of ordinary guys hanging out together, drinking beer. Gabriel seemed relaxed enough, laughing through a stupid-tricks segment, listening with what seemed like interest to an interview with one of the show’s guests, a pretty young starlet Jason had never seen before, who was promoting her latest movie. It felt so normal, so ordinary—it was anything but, and Jason found himself cradling the beer bottle idly between his hands, rolling it back and forth between his palms, more so than drinking from it.
When the program was over, Gabriel leaned forward, remote in hand, and thumbed off the television. He settled back against the couch again, his face twisted with obvious pain, his breath bated for a long moment between clenched teeth.
“It’s not the worst I’ve ever felt,” he said finally in a strained voice, opening one eye to glance at Jason and force a smile. “But it’s damn sure not the best. It’s been a long time since I was last hit by a talisman. I forgot what it feels like.” Almost ruefully, he added, wincing, “Going to have to work harder to remember from now on.”
“Talisman?” Jason asked and Gabriel nodded.
“That’s what we call weapons marked with the triquetra,” he said. “You know what that means?” When Jason nodded, he added, “Well, we actually call them…”
For a moment, his eyes rolled back in his skull, turning not only over to the whites of his cornea, but to that same white fire that had surrounded him earlier. As it filled his eyes, Gabriel tilted his head and opened his mouth, uttering a shrill screech, a piercing series of vibrato sounds that left the window panes rattling across the room. Jason clapped his hands over his ears, wincing.
The sound cut off as Gabriel closed his mouth and Jason lowered his hands hesitantly. “Of course, you can’t walk around talking like that, not unless you want to deafen everyone around you,” the priest said. “So we use filter speech. The listener hears us in whatever dialect is native to them. You’re officially multilingual now.” He clapped his hand against Jason’s shoulder, then grimaced again as he rose slowly, carefully to his feet. “Multi-multi-lingual,” he added. “We’re regular walking Rosetta Stones.”
He shuffled toward the bathroom and closed the door behind him, staying here long enough for Jason to start to worry that maybe he’d passed out or something. He started to get up, meaning to go and knock on the door, check on Gabriel, when the priest came out again, walking slowly, holding his hand gingerly over the panel of bandaging taped across his lower abdomen. Rather than return to the couch, he leaned heavily against the wall, gazing over the top of a lamp at Jason.
“How do you…you know.” He flapped his hand, a sweeping gesture down the length of his body. “Control it? Because you seem to really well. The Eidolon, I mean. I’ve always been told when they take over a form, that’s it. No conscious awareness. No physiological control. That’s what the Wyrm is for. When they make you a Wraith, I mean.”
“I don’t know.” Jason shook his head. “It doesn’t feel like I control it very well. It’s inside me. I can feel it. It’s cold, like everything inside turns to ice. You said you couldn’t get it out of me?”
Gabriel shook his head.
“How can I, then?” Jason asked, pleading. “Get rid of it. What do I need, an exorcism? I just want it gone, my life back.”
Gabriel’s brows lifted slightly, almost as if in pity. “You can’t get rid of it,” he said. “I told you, it’s part of you now. You can’t live without it. The only reason you have any life at all is because it’s inside you. Otherwise that body you’re walking around in, talking through would be worm fodder.”
He drew away from the wall and limped into his bedroom. Jason heard the fridge door open, the jangle of glass bottles knocking together, then a quiet hiss as a bottle cap popped. Gabriel returned, nursing a fresh Heineken. “The life you had before is gone,” he said solemnly, cutting a glance toward the darkened bedroom doorway, beyond which Sam still lay sleeping. “You can’t get that back, Jason, what you had, all the years you’ve lost, the person you were. I’m sorry. I wish you could.”
Jason hung his head. It was what he’d suspected all along, what he’d tried his best to convince himself of, but to hear the words spoken aloud felt like a sledge hammer swinging into his gut, all but doubling him over, leaving him momentarily breathless and pained.
“What happened to the Wyrm?” Gabriel asked, drawing his gaze. “The one that had been in your head. It’s not anymore, is it?”
He looked momentarily alarmed by this notion, had even drawn back a bit in hesitant recoil, but relaxed when Jason shook his head. “No. It’s gone. It fell out. I saw it, felt it, in Seattle, when Nemamiah stabbed me. He’s like you?”
Gabriel smirked. “I wish. No, Nemamiah is much stronger than me. He’s an archangel. One of the chief archangels, in fact. You’re lucky to be here, you know. By all rights, any other Wraith who takes on Nemamiah winds up in the Outer Realm.” When Jason looked puzzled, he said, “It’s sort of like being erased from a chalkboard. It’s non-existence. There’s nothing there—no cognizant awareness, no consciousness, no physical form. You just…cease to be. That’s what happens to us, to Celestials, I mean, if we’re mortally wounded by a talismanic weapon.”
“You mean there’s no way back?” Jason asked.
Gabriel turned away, sipping his beer. “Not that I’ve ever found,” he murmured, a comment so quiet, Jason had the distinct impression he’d not been meant to hear it. At the same time, something in Gabriel’s tone of voice, the way his eyes had hardened, the way his posture had grown rigid with sudden tension, let Jason know that, no way back or not, Gabriel had been looking for one, an escape from the Outer Realm. Though obviously not for himself, there was something in that place he’d described as nothingness that he wanted to at least
try to set free.
Not something, he realized, because Gabriel had said the Outer Realm was a fate reserved for beings like the two of them—Celestials, Gabriel had said—killed by talismanic weapons. Not something. Someone.
The girl. Natalie Reynolds.
Gabriel took a long drink of beer, and when he lowered the bottle from his lips, that granite-like edge to his expression had softened, the stern line of his mouth loosening. He cut his gaze toward Jason and managed a crooked smile. “I’ve lost you, haven’t I?”
“Not exactly,” Jason said.
“Okay.” Gabriel grimaced again as he shuffled over to the couch, lowering himself to sit beside Jason. “I’ll try to explain this as simply as I can. People generally have the right idea about things—life, the universe and everything. The ancient Greeks called it logos. The Egyptians called it Ma’at. Then you’ve got yin and yang or the principles of Tao and Dharma. Jews call it mitzvot or the law. But it all pretty much means the same.”
He held out one hand, palm turned up. “You’ve got good.” He held out his other hand. “You’ve got bad. Then you’ve got free will to choose one or the other for yourself. Sometimes you choose good. Sometimes you choose bad. Choose good enough, you get to see me when you’re dead. But you choose bad enough…” He shrugged, sipping his beer. “You get to see Sitri and his like. It’s pretty much that simple.”
He cut Jason a glance. “Which is why you’re the proverbial riddle wrapped up in an enigma and inside a mystery. Because you shouldn’t be here. Not the way you are. Not with that thing inside you.”
“The Eidolon,” Jason said softly and Gabriel nodded.
“You’re unmarked,” he said, brushing his fingertips demonstratively across his forehead. “If your soul was bound for the Nephilim—that’s Sitri and his lot, or demons, I guess you could say—you’d be marked so they would know. A chevron shape, a little V, like a burn on your forehead.”
Jason nodded, having seen these before. Sitri had one. So, too, had all the Nephilim he’d seen in his memories and dreams, from Mara to the lowliest of Hounds.
“I’ve heard it called the mark of Cain or of perdition or some such bullshit, but to me, it’s just a categorical thing to make sure we get the good souls and they get the bad, good and bad being simplified terms here, you understand—generalizations, not judgments. We don’t judge. It’s not our place. It’s forbidden.”
He tilted back his head, draining his beer, then set the empty bottle aside on an end table. “By us, I mean the Elohim. I’m a gatekeeper,” he said. “One of the lowest tiers among the Elohim, a shepherd spirit between the mortal plain and the Netherworlde.” When Jason looked at him, bewildered, he laughed. “In layman’s terms, I’m an angel. Not the angel Gabriel, as in, ‘In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a town in Galilee, to a virgin pledged to be married to a man named Joseph, blah-blah-blah’ but an angel just the same. Metaphorically speaking, of course. There are no such things as angels, you know, not like you see in paintings and books. No wings or harps or celestial robes. There are no demons either. Those are mortal terms, superstitions created by a species notorious for coming up with the phantasmagorical to explain things they can’t otherwise comprehend. And before you ask, no, I don’t know if there’s a God or a heaven. Or a hell, for that matter. Those all lie beyond the Edge, somewhere I’ve never been.”
“The Edge?” Jason frowned. “Of what?”
Gabriel raised his brow. “Of the Netherworlde. You’ve seen it before. It’s a place for spirits, for Celestials—Elohim and Nephilim. We each have a side, and in the middle between us, there’s the darkness of the Outer Realm. When someone dies, we collect their souls. Elohim take the good, Nephilim take the bad and we both deliver them to the Edge where the Netherworlde and Outer Realm meet. Mortal souls move on from here for the most part—they’re taken by spirit forms called the Ophanim for final judgment and, I assume, some kind of eternal placement, be it heaven, hell, limbo, Hades, Asgard, whatever you want to call it. Any of this making sense?”
“None whatsoever,” Jason replied and Gabriel laughed.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he said again. “When you died five years ago, someone like me, a gatekeeper, should have come to claim you, brought you to the Netherworlde and turned you over to the Ophanim beyond the Edge. The Ophanim have dibs on final judgment. They’re like the mouth of God, or Allah, or whatever. The ancient Egyptians believed that your heart would be weighed on a scale, balanced against a feather to make sure you were just. Zoroastrians thought you crossed a bridge no wider than a hair to reach the afterlife, and if you were righteous, you could make it, but if not, you fell into hell. The point is, you’re unmarked. You have what’s called the spirit of the righteous. Your heart would have balanced the feather. You should have been able to cross the hair bridge. The Nephilim shouldn’t have been able to touch you.”
He frowned. “And I don’t know why they did, much less why they bound a shadow demon to you, made you a Wraith.”
“What is a Wraith supposed to do?” Jason asked.
“You know what it’s supposed to do,” Gabriel said. “You saw my computer in there, my papers. A Wraith is a spiritual assassin here on the mortal plain.”
Gabriel met his gaze grimly. “You’re my enemy. A destroyer of angels.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Jason leaned over the toilet, doubled at the waist as he heaved, vomiting up beer in a sour, frothy gush.
I killed those people, he thought, one hand pressed against the wall, the other against the commode seat as his stomach knotted and again he retched. I’m a murderer. They’re all dead because of me.
He remembered the gladiatorial combats in the Netherworlde great hall, driving his sword through his opponents’ skulls. Not a game, he realized now, to his horror. Not a game at all, but some kind of training, practice for when Sitri brought me to Seattle.
He taught me to be a killer.
He hadn’t turned the light on, having been in too much of a mad, frantic rush as the wave of nausea had overpowered him in the living room. The bathroom was small, little more than a closet, and dark save for the spill of light through the open doorway. This irregular parallelogram of yellow glow was suddenly broken as Gabriel stepped up to the threshold.
“It wasn’t you,” he said gently.
“Yes, it was.” Jason spat violently, his head still hanging down as he gasped for breath. “You told me so yourself. You attacked me for it earlier.”
“You shot me up with heroin,” Gabriel replied pointedly. “I didn’t know what I was saying, much less doing. It wasn’t you. It was Sitri. It was his Wyrm, his will that controlled you and the Eidolon. You couldn’t have stopped yourself if you’d tried.”
Jason groped for the handle and flushed the toilet. He closed his eyes and leaned against the wall, trembling. “Who was she?” he whispered. “The girl in Seattle?”
“Here, she was called Natalie Reynolds. But I knew her by her birth name—Miria. For a long time, I knew her.”
Jason stared at him, stricken. He was in love with her, he realized. Like Sam is to me, that’s how he felt about her. “And I killed her,” he said. “She’s gone now, to that place, that Outer Realm. She can never come back.”
“No.” Gabriel turned, walking slowly back toward the couch. “She can’t.”
****
“Sitri wants you.”
Jason had returned to the living room but paced restlessly. Gabriel had cracked open another beer and sat on the couch, holding the bottle in his hand as he spoke.
“He’s doing his damnedest to find you,” Gabriel said. Jason had told him about what had happened at the tavern, the sewage creature in the bathroom, and the way J-Dog’s apartment had attacked him. Shedim, Gabriel had called these things.
“Demon spirits with no bodies of their own,” he’d explained. “They can inhabit anything. They can be benevolent or vengeful—Jewish mystics use to summon the
m in humanoid earthen forms called golems—but since they inhabit the Nephilim half of the Netherworlde, they’re usually not put to any kind of good or beneficial use.”
Jason had also relayed everything he could remember about his time in the Netherworlde, including the medieval dining hall in which the guests had all feasted on rotten food, looking no better than corpses themselves.
“They’re called the Gader’el,” Gabriel said. “The highest tier of demons. The nine you described in the thrones are called the Powers, the strongest of them all. The other sorts—Goblins, Hounds, Wraiths, Shedim—they’re all little more than cannon fodder or slaves. The Gader’el Powers are the brains of the Nephilim outfit, the ones that are truly evil. That hall is part of their central keep, a place the ancient Nordic tribes called Eljudnir in their mythology.”
“Sitri made me do things there,” Jason said quietly. In his mind, he could still see the man’s eyes, the other Wraith he’d been forced to fight, the look of stark realization and terror in those fleeting milliseconds before Jason had delivered the final, lethal sword strike. “Awful things.”
“I’m sorry.” Gabriel’s voice was gentle.
“He raped me,” Jason whispered in stricken, ashamed admittance.
“I’m sorry.” Gabriel said again, still kind.
The more Jason thought about it, the more furious he could feel himself becoming.
I thought you’d like to be the first among us in all of history to ride the cock of a righteous man, Sitri had offered to the icy woman he’d called his sister.
“Jason,” Gabriel said, groaning softly as he struggled to stand.