The Fallen 01 - Raziel

by Kristina Douglas

  And an extraordinary woman she was. Over six feet tall, she was one of those ageless women who might be anywhere between forty and sixty, with the serene grace and lean, agile body that probably came from decades of yoga. The kind of woman who made me feel lumpy and inadequate. The practice of yoga always seemed to suggest a moral superiority rather than a physical conditioning, and I mentally promised myself that I’d drag out the yoga DVDs that were still shrink-wrapped, sitting on my bookshelves.

  No, I wouldn’t. I wasn’t going home. That was one thing I knew, amidst all the vast holes in my memory. There was no returning to my comfortable life in the Village. Just as well—I couldn’t really afford that apartment, but it had been so gorgeous that I’d gladly beggared myself for the chance to live there.

  Well, maybe if I was going to stay, I’d have Sarah teach me yoga. If it made me look as good as she did at her age, it was clearly worth the effort.

  Sarah had silver hair in one long, thick braid, wise blue eyes, and a rich, comforting voice, and when she’d eventually dismissed the other women, some half dozen between the ages of twenty and forty, she’d sat by my bed until I slept. My questions would be answered soon enough, Sarah had said. For now I should rest.

  Which I was quite happy to do. The night before had been endless, lying huddled against Raziel’s blazing body, trying to get comfortable with sticks and rocks and hard earth digging into my soft flesh. Maybe if I slept long enough, this nightmare would be over.

  No such luck. When I awoke I was alone, and hungry again. I sat up, waiting for my eyes to grow accustomed to the darkness. I was wearing soft clothes, a loose-fitting white dress of some sort, and I remembered the embarrassing battle I’d had with the Step-ford wives when they wanted to bathe me. A battle I’d lost.

  I touched my hair, finding it freshly washed but still that disconcerting length. I hadn’t worn my hair that long since I’d attended that lousy high school outside of Hartford, after I’d been kicked out of my expensive boarding school. Not that that was my fault. It had been the one fundamentalist Christian boarding school in the entire liberal, anarchistic, blaspheming state of Connecticut. Clearly I was going to break out as soon as I could.

  Always in trouble, my mother had said in disgust, praying over me loudly. I always got the feeling that she never prayed for me in private—that her loud exhortations were for my benefit and mine alone. I was a miserable daughter, she told me, always spitting in the face of society, always talking too much and pushing against the status quo. Was that what had got me here? And where the hell was here?

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed, feeling dizzy for a moment. There were shoes on the floor, and I slipped my feet into them, then winced, kicking them off again as I rubbed my heel. I had a blister there, left from those miserable shoes—

  That was flat-out impossible. A blister healed in a few days, but it took months to grow my hair this long. Months that I couldn’t remember. Maybe I hadn’t lost huge blocks of time after all. The idea was reassuring, but it held its own kind of freakiness. None of this was making any sense, and I needed it to, quite desperately.

  Sarah would tell me the truth if I asked. Unlike the man, she wouldn’t just brush off my questions, ignore my doubts. The warmth and truth of Sarah was palpable, soothing. I needed to find her.

  I didn’t bother searching for a light beside the high bed; I didn’t bother with the shoes. The door was ajar, a sliver of light beckoning, and I started toward it, feeling only slightly uneasy. I’d seen those movies, read those books. Hell, written those books, where the stupid heroine in her virginal white goes wandering where she shouldn’t, and the homicidal maniac appears out of nowhere, complete with a butcher knife or an ax or a fish spike.

  I shivered. People got murdered in their beds, too. Staying put wasn’t going to get me anywhere.

  The outer room was empty. Hours ago this had been filled with women. Now it was abandoned, thank God, leaving me to my own devices, to find my own answers.

  I looked down at my flowing white dress. Yup, virgin sacrifice stuff, all right. At least I was a far cry from a virgin—if they wanted to cut out my heart as an offering to the gods, the gods were going to be mighty pissed. Though in truth, that part was virginal. I’d had sex, but my heart had never been touched.

  All the women had been similarly dressed, in some variant of flowing white clothes. They all had long hair, loose and natural, and they’d been warm, welcoming. Stepford wives. Had I been abducted into some kind of cult? Next thing I knew we’d be singing hymns and drinking Kool-Aid.

  I shivered again. The women hadn’t looked like mind-sucked idiots. My imagination was running away with me, and no wonder. Somewhere along the way I’d fallen down the rabbit hole, and nothing made sense anymore.

  The hallway was as deserted as the rooms, a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I didn’t want to be shepherded back to the bedroom with a bunch of platitudes. On the other, I didn’t know where the hell I was going, or whether Freddy Krueger was about to appear.

  I looked around me. The interior of the house was interesting—it look like an old California lodge from long ago, with bronze art-deco sconces on the wall that made me think of Hollywood in the 1930s. There were overstuffed leather chairs and mission-style tables at various intervals down the long hall, with an ancient Persian runner in the center of the highly buffed floor, and a sudden horrifying suspicion came to me.

  Things were bizarre enough already—if I’d somehow managed to travel through time, back eighty years to the early part of the last century, I would be extremely annoyed. That was the problem with time travel—no one ever asked if you’d be interested. Just a flash of lightning and you were gone.

  I remembered a flash of lightning, on a New York street. The vision was swift and fleeting, and then I was back in this weird old house, looking for serial killers.

  No, time travel was out of the question. I simply refused to consider the possibility. It was as absurd as some of the half-remembered fantasies that played in the back of my mind. Wings? A body with fire beneath the skin? A vampire?

  I became aware of a sound, quiet, muffled, a soft chanting not unlike the voices I’d heard on the beach—the sound those men had made as they’d tried to drown my rescuer and I’d gone splashing into the surf like a complete idiot to save him. I listened carefully, trying to make out the words. It bore no resemblance to any language I’d ever heard, just a strange, almost melodic thread of noise.

  Well, if they were getting ready for a virgin sacrifice, at least they weren’t planning to slice and dice me. Besides, there was something infinitely soothing about those voices, something that drew me toward them.

  I began to move down the halls, silent on my bare feet, and at each juncture I took a turn unerringly. Me, who could never find my way through the haphazard streets of the Village no matter how long I’d lived there. I didn’t stop to question it—I just kept going. Maybe I’d been given superpowers, like a decent sense of direction. Anything was possible.

  The sound never grew louder, never softened. I could hear it inside my head, feel it underneath my skin; and when I finally stopped outside an ornately carved set of double doors, I knew I’d found answers.

  I paused. Something stopped me from going farther, just for the moment. So unlike me—I was a woman who always wanted straight answers, no matter how painful, and I knew that answers lay beyond those heavy doors, beneath the steady, almost musical chant that emanated from behind them. I had never been the type to hesitate—what the hell was wrong with me?

  I pushed open the doors and froze.

  It looked like some strange sort of temple, though clearly not for any religion I was familiar with. There was no cross, no ark to hold the Torah. Only the cluster of people in the center of the cavernous room lit by a strange, unearthly glow.

  My eyes focused on Sarah, sitting in a chair that seemed like a cross between a throne and a La-Z-Boy. Sarah’s calm blue eyes had been closed in
a look of meditation, but they opened and turned to mine, almost as if she’d heard my clumsy entrance above the soft chanting.

  She smiled gently that serene, sweet smile that seemed to bestow a blessing on everyone around her, and the others must have realized that I was there, for the chanting stopped abruptly and the men moved back.

  He knelt beside Sarah. I knew who he was immediately, even in the candlelight. I knew the sun-shot hair, the rough grace. His head was bent over Sarah’s outstretched wrist, but I must have made some kind of noise, and he lifted his face to stare at me.

  I could see the blood at his mouth, the elongated fangs, the pulsing veins at Sarah’s slender wrist, and I know I let out the most girly shriek of horror.

  And then I ran, letting the heavy doors slam shut behind me.

  CHAPTER

  SEVEN

  I MADE IT AS FAR AS THE GRASS IN front of the house before I went sprawling face-first. I hit the rough sand on my knees and elbows, sliding, and ended up at the very edge of the water, breathless, my arms over my head as if I were ducking from a hurricane. It was impossible. Flat-out impossible.

  Someone must have drugged me. That was the only reasonable explanation for what I thought I’d just seen, for the craziness that shot such holes in my memory. But if I was still drugged, who and what could I trust? I rolled onto my back, still gasping for breath as I stared up at the house. Parts of it stuck out at strange angles, like a bureau with the drawers pulled out at varying degrees. The sun was setting behind me, reflecting off the windows, rendering them golden and opaque. Someone inside was looking down at me. If the house even existed, if the ocean existed, if I existed.

  It was the oddest feeling: I couldn’t trust anything, my eyes, my ears—even the rich salty smell of the ocean could be part of some bizarre hallucination that had started God knows when. I stared up at the darkening sky, trying to pull in what few things I remembered. I could still feel the man’s hands on me as he’d tried to throw me into some deep, bottomless hole. So, serial killer, right? But he’d pulled me back. Serial killer with a conscience?

  But maybe he hadn’t pulled me back after all. Maybe this was what death was like—a long, strange, trippy hallucination with vampires and men with wings—

  Men with wings? Where had that come from? I briefly considered sitting up, then decided against it. I was just fine where I was. Sprawled on the rocky beach, I kept a lower profile. I could just stay this way, listening to the soft hush of the ocean, until the drugs wore off or I woke up or whatever.

  Or discovered I was in hell, or heaven, or somewhere in between. Sitting up meant I’d have to do something, and right then I just didn’t have the energy.

  The setting sun was blotted out for a moment, and I looked up to see the man standing over me. Raziel, had they called him? Strange name, just another part of the nightmare that had started with his hands on me.

  “How long are you going to lie there?” He had such a beautiful voice, the kind that could lure angels to their doom; yet the words were calm and emotionless. “It’s cold and the tide’s coming in, plus there’s a nasty riptide that could pull you out to sea before anyone realized what had happened. You may as well get up—running isn’t going to change things.”

  The sunset was gilding him, a nimbus of color around his tall body. I made myself relax. Not a vampire, then. I knew the rules—they couldn’t be in the sun.

  I hadn’t realized I’d spoken the words out loud. Not until he answered me.

  “You’re an expert on vampires now, are you?” he said.

  I considered not rising, but lying sprawled in front of him definitely put me at a disadvantage, so I sat up, ignoring the shriek of my stiff muscles. I glared at him. “No, I’m not. I don’t believe in them, and if you and your friends are into that kind of scene, then you can count me out. I want to go home.”

  He was looking at me with detached interest. “‘Kind of scene’?” he echoed.

  There was no blood on his mouth now. Maybe I’d imagined it. My brain still didn’t seem be holding two thoughts together. “I’m not a complete idiot,” I said in a cranky voice. “I know there’s an entire subculture of people who like to pretend they’re vampires. They file their teeth to points, they hang out in Goth clubs, they drink blood, they dress in Edwardian clothes . . .” My voice trailed off. Black jeans and a worn black denim shirt didn’t equal Edwardian finery and we both knew it, though I was willing to bet he’d look pretty damned gorgeous in a white puffy shirt. Considering that he looked pretty damned gorgeous already.

  “I don’t see a Goth club anywhere,” he said. “No one around here would pretend to be a vampire.”

  “So what was that I walked in on a few minutes ago?”

  “Allie?” Sarah came up behind him before he could answer, almost as tall, with another of the men just behind her. “What’s wrong?”

  “You know what’s wrong,” I said, feeling cranky despite the fact that I liked Sarah. “I saw him.”

  “Saw him what?”

  I looked at her narrow wrists: blue-veined, delicate, and unmarred. I pulled my knees up close to my body, hugging them. “Who are you people?” I demanded in a frustrated moan.

  “Come back to the house, Sarah,” the other man said impatiently. “This is Raziel’s mess—it’s up to him to deal with it.” There was an oddly proprietary tone to his voice.

  “In a moment,” Sarah said, kneeling next to me and putting her hand on my arm. “I don’t want you to be afraid, child. No one is going to hurt you.”

  I wasn’t as sure as she was, either about Raziel or about the other man. He was as tall as Raziel, with jet-black hair, cold blue eyes, and a merciless expression on his face. “I want to go home,” I said again, feeling like a fretful, stubborn child.

  The other man swore. “Raziel, do something about this. That, or let me clean up the mess you’ve made.”

  “Give her a minute, Azazel,” Sarah said over her shoulder. “She’s shocked and frightened, and no wonder, with the two of you stomping around, being mysterious. If Raziel won’t give her some simple answers, then I will.”

  “Woman,” Azazel said in an icy voice, “I want you upstairs in bed.”

  “Husband,” Sarah replied sweetly, “I’ll be there when I’m damned well ready.”

  Well, that was definitely weird. Azazel had to be in his early to mid-thirties; Sarah was likely in her fifties and probably older. It was hardly surprising—Sarah was a beautiful woman—but most of the men I knew liked nubile young chicklets. At the ripe old age of thirty, I’d already been dumped once for someone younger and more pliant.

  “She’s going to come inside,” Raziel said, making it clear there were no options. That’s what he thought. My eyes narrowed, looking up at him.

  “And just where is she going?” the other man demanded.

  “My rooms,” Raziel said. “I don’t see that we have any other choice.”

  “She’s certainly not coming with us,” Azazel snapped.

  Sarah rose, a graceful, fluid motion that made me desperately envious. If I got back home, I was definitely going to start going to yoga. When, not if. I wasn’t giving them any choice in the matter. I wanted my life back.

  “Go with Raziel, child,” she said. “He’s not going to hurt you. In fact, he’s been looking out for you. When he wasn’t dying of fire poisoning,” she added with a mischievous glance at him. “Go with him, and he’ll answer any questions you have.”

  “The hell I will,” Raziel said. “I’ll take her to my rooms and leave her there until I figure out—”

  “You’ll do what Sarah says,” Azazel said, his soft voice chilling.

  Raziel shot the other man a disgruntled look. And then he crossed the sand to me, holding out his hand.

  I stared at it, not moving. Now was not the time to notice that he had strong, beautiful hands. Or that everything about him was beautiful, almost supernaturally so. I didn’t like pretty men, damn it. Though God knows I was
n’t sure if I’d ever seen anyone quite as gorgeous as he was.

  “Don’t make me carry you,” he said in a warning voice.

  Azazel and Sarah were already heading into the house, his arm around her waist. For a moment I considered scrambling to my feet and running after them; but reasonable or not, Azazel terrified me even more than this inexplicable man.

  I needed to get up, not loll there like a Victorian heroine. The only problem was that my knees felt like spaghetti. I’m as tough as the next woman, tougher maybe, but I’d been through a hell of a lot in the last . . . whatever. There was a limit to how much I could handle. I tried to rise, but he ended up putting his hands on my arms and hauling me up anyway. He released me quickly enough, and started back toward the odd house, clearly expecting me to follow like a dutiful third-world bride.

  The hell with that. I looked around me for some kind of escape and came up with a flat zero, unless I wanted to pull a Virginia Woolf and walk into the sea. There was no place else for me to go. The tide was coming in, and beyond the house all was misty darkness and forest. Besides, I was finally going to get some answers to my questions, wasn’t I?

  I just managed to catch up with him. His long legs ate up the distance, but after a shaky start I managed a brisk trot. “You needn’t be so grumpy,” I said, trying not to huff and puff. “It’s your fault I’m here.”

  “In case you don’t remember, I was unconscious when they brought me back.”

  “That’s up to interpretation,” I said. “I can’t argue, since I seem to have huge gaps in my memory. What do you think they should have done, then? Left me in the forest? With those wild animals out there in the dark?”