On Unfaithful Wings

by Bruce Blake

  Michael and Azrael.

  I knew what I was seeing: my birth.

  The schoolyard, the murdered women. It didn’t make any sense for them to be in my Hell. I didn’t know any of them, hadn’t lived through any of it. But this...

  The woman lying on the table--my mother--screamed with pain and effort, a primal sound that shook my bones. A different sort of sound followed, a startling, joyous sound: the cry of a newborn. Sister Mary-Therese rocked back and held the child up--the child cursed to become me--umbilical cord trailing beneath my mother’s nightgown, a smile across the nun’s face.

  The smile disappeared.

  I wanted to move forward, see what caused her distress, but it became apparent as the smell of blood filled the air. I almost turned to see if the murdered women had returned, but didn’t. My mother’s face blanched. Sister Mary-Therese’s expression turned to shock as the bed sheets around her turned crimson. Heart in my throat, I reached out in desperation to do anything I could to save her but an invisible barrier held me at bay.

  This was the moment of my mother’s death and I could do nothing to help her.

  “No!”

  The scene froze.

  Sister Mary-Therese stood with the baby-me in her arms, face tight with concern, tears glistening on her cheeks. My entire life, she’d been watching over me, mostly from afar, but always there in my times of need, and I’d never stopped to question why. It was no coincidence she found me on the streets, rescued me, been available for me at every turn.

  She’d done it for my mother.

  If only I’d tried harder to save her.

  Michael and Azrael stood like statues looming over my mother, like bogeymen competing to give her the biggest fright. Only my mother remained moving. She bent her head toward me and I saw relief in her eyes despite the dark circles beneath them. The corners of her mouth crinkled into a tired-looking smile, giving her back some of the look of the striking spirit I’d encountered on the bus.

  “Icarus.”

  “Mother.”

  I tried to take a step, but my feet wouldn’t move. I extended a hand toward her, reaching to have the touch I’d never known.

  “You must go, my son.”

  “But--”

  “Now, Icarus. The door at the end of the hall. Stop for no others.”

  “Mother, I--”

  “Run!”

  The urgency in her voice released me. I rushed to the door and burst into the hallway, pausing to look back and glimpse the other three reanimating. Sister Mary-Therese yelled for help as, unseen, Michael and Azrael jostled with each other for position at my mother’s side, each of them reaching for her. Another figure appeared, this one dressed in a black cloak with a cowl pulled down over his face--Carrion. The black-clad figure stepped past the others, grabbed my mother by the arm and helped her soul sit up from the lifeless body. Its head turned my way and I strained to see into the shadow cast by the hood.

  “No!”

  The door closed.

  I blundered a couple of steps down the hall, my head spinning with what I’d seen--not just my mother and the sister, but the inexplicable presence of the archangels at my mother’s death. Before I could make sense of it, the entity in the hall made itself known, pushing me to move. It’s force was immense, smothering, obliterating all thoughts from my mind save for my mother’s last words. For the first and last time in my life, she’d told me what to do. I wouldn’t let her down.

  I ran.

  Doors appeared at shorter and shorter intervals, each of them whispering to me as I passed, promising riches, women, happiness, bribing me to veer off my path. I wanted to. The pressure of the thing at my back let up and I found myself pausing outside one door, fingers brushing the doorknob. I stared at the brass knob, felt its coolness on my fingertips; I smelled the metal. My fingers tightened on it and a flare went off in my brain.

  This isn’t what I’m supposed to be doing.

  A second thought followed immediately on the heels of the first.

  But what is it I’m supposed to be doing?

  The knob squeaked as I turned it a quarter turn, but my brain registered the sound as the cry of my son’s voice, quiet and weak, calling for help. I let go of the knob and backed away, hand shaking.

  The thing in the hall returned, leaving me no time for regret or guilt. I thought of Trevor as I returned to my flight down Hell’s corridor, kept his face in mind as I rushed by more and more doors.

  Most of the doors stood open, revealing their horrors for any who cared to look. I struggled not to peer into them as I ran but found it too much to ask of myself. In one I glimpsed a torture chamber--a man chained to the wall, flayed by an unseen hand. In another, a man knelt naked on the floor, his manhood resting on a stump while a man wearing an executioner’s mask waved an axe in the air above it. The closed doors tempted me still as, despite the atrocities I knew they concealed, I found myself wondering what lay behind them. It took great effort not to stop and find out, but my mother’s words rang in my head and the thing gaining ground behind me kept me moving. Finally, the end of the hall came into view; a nondescript door represented my escape.

  Or so the woman I thought my mother said.

  What if it wasn’t really her?

  Doubt hadn’t occurred to me until the possibility of my escape loomed. They’d disguised someone as Gabe to fool me before, maybe my mother was a demon in disguise, intended to send me to an eternity reliving every terrible instant of my life--and there had been more than a few. My pace slowed as I neared the door, but the pressure at my back pushed me on like a tsunami carrying a body surfer inexorably toward the rocks.

  My feet skidded on the floor as I attempted to slow down. Suddenly, whatever might be behind the door mattered less than the fact I was about to be pancaked against it with incredible force. I struggled to gain control and failed miserably, then remembered the door at the rectory, and the Honda’s ignition.

  The pressure at my back increased as I focused all my attention and will on the door, pictured it flying open without thought to what might lie beyond. The temperature around me rose, the flames from the walls and floor licking at my flesh, tasting it like a hungry dog. I ignored the flames, the thing filling the hall behind me, and concentrated on the door. It shook minutely, trembled, then nothing. Ii sped toward it, close enough now I could make out the shape of its panels and imagine them impressed upon my body. I took a deep breath that singed my lungs and focused my thoughts again.

  The door knob shook. The door shuddered, opened a few inches and slammed closed, then finally flew open the second before I would have become intimately entwined with the grain of its wood. I leapt through, a sprinter making the final push for the finish line.

  I skidded across the floor on my shoulder, snow-plowing paper ahead of me and stopping when my back met something hard. I jumped to my feet, ready to defend myself, but found I’d reemerged in the church not far from the altar. It didn’t surprise me when I glanced back and saw no door behind me. The hostile pressure at my back was gone, too, but was it hostile? I’d left Hell undamaged; it merely impelled me to keep going, forced me back to Trevor.

  My curiosity over the strange force was as short-lived as my sigh of relief.

  My son lay unmoving atop the altar, the priest gone from his side. Seeing him drove thoughts of the thing in the hall from my head; everything in me wanted to race to his side, but the suspicion I’d be walking into a trap overpowered my desperation to save him. The multitude of guttering candles set throughout the room cast odd shadows, flickering hundreds of demons and ghosts along the walls. I ignored the illusion and crept toward the altar, feet scraping through broken pottery and crumpled paper.

  Halfway to my goal, I noticed the man looming beside the ruined organ. He might have been a statue for all he moved, but the glint of candlelight shining in his eyes told me otherwise. He seemed to sense my gaze upon him and moved into the light. As he did, I saw he had someone else wi
th him. The uncertain light revealed more as he took another step toward me.

  One arm encircled Poe’s waist, his other hand grasped her by the throat. I didn’t want anything to happen to her, or to Trevor, but it was the sight of the man towering behind her, holding her, that made my heart forget to beat a couple dozen times.

  Azrael.

  “Icarus,” he said in a drawl both free of accents and rife with them. “The time has come for you to come home.”

  It took a second to shake off the feeling of surprise and dread. By the time I did, Father Dominic had already plunged his knife into my back.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  My body tensed as the knife entered me like a rough lover, but while my energy disappeared like air escaping a balloon the first time I’d been stabbed, this time my limbs swelled with inexplicable power. The priest wrenched the blade free, twisting it on the way out, its edge grinding against my spine. I sucked in a shuddering breath, gritted my teeth against the burning sensation in my back, and savored the rage exploding through my body.

  He wasn’t ready for the roundhouse backhand I surprised him with, catching him full force to the side of the head. The impact sent him reeling, giving him no time to consider poking me a second time. Warm blood ran down my back and into my skivvies, the feel of it feeding the anger swirling in me, building it to a crescendo like a spring river pounding against a dam.

  Father Dominic regained his balance as I drove my shoulder into his mid-section. The knife tumbled to the floor. I took half-a-second of satisfaction at the sound of the blade hitting the carpet but didn’t allow myself to savor it given my opponent looked like an extra from Night of the Living Dead and knocking the wind out of him probably wouldn’t slow him. His fists hammering my kidneys and the fresh knife wound in my back proved it. I rammed him into an overturned pew, and then threw my shoulder into his bread basket a couple times.

  I straightened to admire my work and saw the inverted cross carved in his forehead come at me with no time to dodge, crunching against the bridge of my nose sending blood gushing down my face. My head rang like a tuning fork as the impact staggered me.

  The priest took advantage of the opportunity, grabbing a fistful of lapel in each hand and lifting me into the air; my toes dangled uselessly three inches above the floor. Through blurred vision, I saw Azrael standing beside the altar and my nerves jumped. Trevor stirred minutely, looking like someone waking with a monster hangover after a late night. With Poe still pinned against his chest, the fallen angel moved closer to Trevor, within arm’s reach. Seeing him so close to my son forced me back into action despite my foggy head and the ringing in my ears. I clutched the priest’s wrists, wrestled to free myself, but his grip was solid.

  The altar disappeared from view as Father Dominic threw me across the room. My ass hit the floor, the police handcuffs in my back pocket jamming painfully into my cheek, and slid on the mess of torn psalms, stopping when my back smacked the corner of a pew, sending a fresh jolt of pain from my newest knife wound. The desire to sit a minute, let my head stop spinning, got vetoed when my spidey-sense tingled in overdrive.

  I rolled to the right. The dead priest’s foot hammered the floor in the area my balls just vacated.

  So that’s how it’s going to be, is it? The Marquis of Queensbury’s rules out the window in favor of the Marquis du Sade’s.

  Scrambling out of the way, my hand happened upon a thick bible still possessing most of its pages; I hurled it at his head in an attempt to buy myself time to gain my feet. The good book burst into flames midair, falling to ash before it reached its target.

  Nice trick, but not good for me.

  He brushed the debris from the front of his vestments, smearing ash with the blood and God-knows-what-else on it, and strode toward me. I crawled away, sputtering blood from my lips, but he grabbed me by the scruff of the neck and slammed me onto my back, bearing down on me, giving no opportunity to defend myself. His knees pinned my arms at my sides, immobilizing me while his fingers found my throat. I squirmed beneath him, my muscles burning as desperation sent lactic acid through my limbs.

  The priest leaned forward, leering, willing me dead; inches separated our faces. The smell of him oozed into my pores, a different odor than at the jail--still the scent of turned earth, as if he’d recently vacated an open grave, but this time the other stink seemed more seared flesh than burnt toast. If his fingers weren’t wrapped around my neck, I’d have gagged.

  My eyes rolled, searching for something to use as a weapon, to hit him with, or stab him, or shoot him, whatever. Chunks of wood splintered off the corner of a pew lay nearby, but my hands trapped beneath his knees kept them tantalizingly close but unreachable. I wiggled and shrugged to no avail. He leaned closer, lips pulled back in a blood-stained sneer, drinking in every second of my agony, waiting to savor my final breath. I stared back at him, cringing from the smell. At least in my final minute I’d show him the little boy who’d grown up in fear of him was gone. If the outcome of our meeting would be my death, I’d die like a man.

  But if I die, Trevor dies.

  A bolt of panic shot through my body, stiffening my limbs. The priest looked intense, greedy, like a starving man about to bite into Dickens’ Christmas goose. It was the same sort of look I’d seen on his face when I was a child and it reminded me why I hated him.

  A line of saliva ran from the corner of his mouth threatening to drip on my cheek. I stared up at him, my back teeth grinding together hard enough I thought they might break, when I felt a light pressure on my face, like someone had dropped a pillow there.

  Father Dominic’s expression changed. His perverted grin drooped, his eyebrows raised; the fire blazing in his eyes dimmed. The hatred and rage and triumph mixing on his face disappeared, shifting to surprise--and not the kind like when someone gives an unexpected gift, more the I-found-a-snake-in-my-sleeping-bag kind of surprise.

  Panic bled away, forced from my being by a surge of energy beginning in my chest: a feeling too intense to be my lungs pleading for air. The sensation spread like a drop of ink on a square of paper towel, filling my groin and spilling down my arms and legs, numbing the multiple points of pain in my back, my limbs, my face. The desperation caused by lack of breath vanished.

  Something seeped out of the priest’s face.

  It curled from his nose and mouth, a wisp of smoke reminiscent of agent orange dissipating from a vacant trench. His surprised look deepened and the pressure on my throat diminished. For a moment, I shared his astonishment and wanted to turn my head away, but as the vapor found its way into my nostrils and throat, realization seeped into me along with the mist. Against his will, with no effort on my part, I was harvesting the priest’s soul.

  I didn’t know I could do that.

  Father Dominic guessed what transpired about the same time I did. He released his grip on my throat and jumped back, tearing his gaze away, stopping the flow. It felt like someone used a hanger to remove a piece of my brain through my nose. I scrambled to my feet, not bothering to waste time gasping for air or wondering if he should have been able to extract himself like that. The advantage belonged to me now and I wanted every inch it gave me.

  The priest stood three yards away, body coiled to spring. The look of surprise had melted from his face and he averted his gaze studiously from mine, making eye contact for only fractions of a second at a time. The soul-gathering thing that he’d interrupted before it got rolling had startled him, but the element of surprise was gone. He’d be ready next time.

  If I could figure out how to do it again.

  We circled one another--dogs looking for an opening to go for the other’s throat. I passed within a couple of feet of the pointed chunks of pew lying on the floor. Bending over to grab them would leave me open to attack and, if he got behind me, I was fucked. Still, I needed them. The priest’s strength was too much for me. If we kept going head to head, I’d likely end up missing mine.

  I jitterbugged to
the right, away from my goal, then feinted toward Father Dominic, hoping to make him commit to an attack. It worked. He lunged and I dove away, rolling across the floor and coming to my feet with a makeshift stake in my hand.

  “Come on,” I yelled finding my breath.

  Over the priest’s shoulder, I saw Azrael watching, his face placid and unemotional, Poe unconscious in his grip. Trevor shifted but his eyes remained closed.

  Hold on, Trev.

  An animal growl brought my attention back to the priest. His face changed, twisted: his jaw bulged with muscle, nostrils flared. His forehead pushed forward like Cro-Magnon man, eyes sinking under a ridge of bone but still not meeting mine.

  “Your time has come, Icarus Fell.” His clenched teeth looked as though they’d lengthened and grown pointier.

  The temperature in the room sky-rocketed. Torn hymnal pages and scriptures strewn across the floor at my feet burst into flame, forcing me to dance back. The priest advanced, his fists engulfed in flame, the fire spreading to every piece of paper, jumping to the broken pews like it had a mind of its own and a voice to urge him on. I scurried away as he surged toward me, his heat igniting the stake in my hand, but I held on. As he reached me I spun away, hit him across the back with both arms using my strength and his momentum to carry him forward into the wall. By the time he regained his balance and turned, I was already in his face.

  I forced his right arm back against the wall and plunged the stake through the palm of his hand, pinning it in place. Before he grabbed me with his free hand, I jumped back out of reach. He screamed with pain and rage, first pulling at his pinned hand, trying to free it, then swinging wildly at me, throwing kicks that fell short. The stake held him but, with his not-of-this-world strength, I didn’t think it would be for long. I had to secure his other arm.