Niki Slobodian 03 - Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

by J. L. Murray

  “Please,” I said. “Don't go out there alone.”

  “Buddy,” said Gage. “Be reasonable. Let us help you.”

  He shook his head. “I can't,” he said. He backed away, looking at us with tears in his eyes, still shaking his head. He turned and ran down a side street.

  “No,” I said, but he was gone and the noise had returned. Explosions, light flickering on the horizon like fireworks, screams. I helped Gage up. I couldn't leave him there to go looking for the man, but I was perplexed.

  “Who the hell was that guy?” said Gage.

  “I don't know,” I said. He was on his feet now, but he was lightheaded and I caught his arm as he started to stagger. He caught his balance.

  “Did you hear those voices?” said Gage.

  “Yeah,” I said surprised. “Did you?”

  “And singing,” he said.

  “I thought maybe it was the ghosts,” I said. “But you heard them too. Odd.”

  “Sis, I don't know if I can cast for a while. Maybe we should head back to the bar.”

  “We're closer to my apartment than the Deep Blue Sea,” I said.

  Gage looked to our left. “Yeah, looks like apartment buildings are just as safe, don't it?”

  I threw him a look. “It's Sofi, Gage,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he said. “Come on, let's do this.” We began walking slowly down the street, avoiding the hole to our left. “Hey,” he said. “Why was that guy even awake? He wasn't an angel or a Hellion. What the hell was he?”

  “I don't know,” I said. “But if he was an Abby, I've never seen anything like him.”

  Five

  I felt naked walking through the streets with no magical protection. The lightning was brighter, harsher, the landscape like an open wound. Every noise grated. The heat inside me had calmed momentarily when the man in the green sweater vest healed Gage, but now it rose up again as we walked. Gage plodded along behind me. He gave me reassuring smiles when I looked at him, but I could see in his eyes that he was afraid. I knew that I should have been afraid too, but I wasn't.

  The ghosts kept following me. They kept their distance, and were quieter than they had been for months, but they were still there. I was just grateful that they didn't approach me.

  Death surrounded us. Unnatural, cruel, bloody death. There was no natural way of things here. Only brutal pain with demons and angels alike ripped barbarically from the living world, their spirits blowing away to cross over like ashes in a windstorm. It was needless and ridiculous. The fighting rang false and ugly to me. It made me feel sick. It also made me feel an anger so deep that I could feel its heat in every cell of my body.

  The power inside of me twisted. I was barely breathing, trying to hold it down. A group of angels froze while extracting a blade from a slight, hornless demon with dusky blue skin. The demon was slumped over, dead. The angels stared at me. I made myself keep walking. Another angel, a man with skin the color of Natalie's and eyes the color of the purple sky, stood in the middle of several bodies that lay in pieces. He held a black sword in his hand. He backed away from me as I passed. A demon woman, her horns curving downward towards her cheeks, her breasts bared, screamed as she raised her hands to the sky, absorbing the lightning, bolts seemingly electrocuting her and lighting up her eyes. She smiled and held her hands toward a large group of angels that had surrounded her. They were smoking heaps by the time I passed her. She looked at me defiantly for a moment, then wavered, and bowed her head respectfully to me.

  “Who do they think I am?” I asked Gage.

  “Sis,” he said, “I don't even know who you are.”

  I looked at him, and he flinched. “Are you afraid of me, Bobby?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Everyone is. And your eyes are glowing again.”

  I turned away from him. The world had started to brighten and turn pale-white. I shut my eyes for a second, willing the power down, stomping it down into a little ball, praying it didn't spread again. “We're almost there,” I said after a moment. I couldn't look at Gage. Everything about this power inside me felt worse when I saw how my friend looked at me. I swallowed hard.

  We turned the corner down my street. It was only a few blocks now. The usually-vibrant neighborhood, usually filled with vendors and thick with food smells, was a different place. There was no chatter of different languages, no babushkas out with their carts to do the shopping, and the tables of fruit and vegetables from the markets were full of smashed pulp of various colors that was starting to attract hordes of flies. A cart lay on its side. I recognized it. It was a cheesesteak cart where I used to buy sandwiches almost every day. The owner, Mac, lay on the ground beside it. All I could see were his legs. I walked around the cart and gagged. It looked like he had been trampled. His head was completely flat and one eye had come out of its socket and hung out of his face, resting on the curb. Melting ice from the cart trickled through the gore, turning magenta with his blood as it dripped into the gutter.

  “You know him?” said Gage.

  I looked around. A building across the street had been demolished. My favorite restaurant was now a pile of rubble and broken glass. A bloody sneaker lay on top of the pile like a grave marker. The old Korean woman that ran the market had fallen against a wooden shelf that had once held oranges. Her head was bleeding and her eyes stared out, unseeing. I saw blood on the corner of the fruit rack, which now dripped with orange pulp and juice.

  Except for the dead, the street was deserted now. I saw the lightning overhead roil into a circle in the sky far away on the horizon, saw light plummet down to the earth, heard an explosion in the distance.

  “Bobby,” I said, my voice small in my ears. “You might want to hang back just in case.”

  “Niki, don't,” he said.

  “I'm not going to do anything,” I said. “I'm just feeling very, very angry. And I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know if I can keep it down much longer.”

  “Okay, sis. Do what you have to do. But don't forget what Sam said.”

  Sam. If it hadn't been for Sam, I'd be dead. But if I was dead, all this suffering could have been avoided. Sam had done this. He'd made me this way. I would never live like a normal person again. Gage backed away from me. I saw the ghosts all around me, giving me a wide berth. They just watched me, waiting. I breathed, the sound loud in my ears. The feeling inside of me, the power, the light, rocketed around inside of me. I didn't know how much longer I could keep it inside my skin. The world was already becoming bright through my eyes.

  I caught my reflection in a window that hadn't been broken. My eyes blazed out of my face, my hair seemed to have life of its own. I was terrifying. I could see why Gage had been afraid. It wasn't me. I had come back from the dead as something else. Something that was no longer me. Something that wasn't human. Instead of calming me, though, the thought just seemed to amplify the heat inside of me. It filled every part of my body. I felt a lightness to my walk, and looked down to see that I was walking just above the ground, the power lifting me up. Each step landed on solid air.

  I sensed something above me. I looked up to see the lightning coagulating on a single spot in the sky. It was almost directly above me. I glanced down to see where it was hovering above and realized it was my own apartment building. The building where Sofi was.

  “No,” I heard myself say. I raised my hands to the sky. The beam of light was coming down fast, but I was faster. I let go of the light inside of me, I let it go from my hands and my mouth and my eyes and my chest. I felt its release like agony that would soon be over. Like a shot of morphine in a gunshot wound. Like death after the pain of burning from the inside out.

  The two columns of light clashed in the sky, high above the building. They flared where they hit, like a vibrant mushroom cloud, one side purple, the other white. Spinning and twisting and turning into each other, they shot light through the sky, penetrating the dusky light. Even through my white-tinted eyes I could see it.r />
  I held steady for seconds that stretched into minutes and seemed like hours. It was almost torture and almost ecstasy. At each moment I didn't know how much longer I could last. I pushed with my mind, thrusting out with the heat inside me, forcing it all out, every centimeter of my body burning, scorching, forcing it all out and into the power in the sky that threatened to kill the one person in the world that I truly loved. I screamed as it exited, my throat raw and bare and feeling scarred and burned. I pushed with everything I had, no matter the pain I felt, and it was excruciating.

  It seemed it would do no good. Sofi was going to die, just like the vendor and the woman in the market. And if that happened, then I might as well die too. The war might end if I died, unless Sam was true to his word and came looking for me again.

  Just when I thought I had lost, the column began to move. Not towards me or the apartment building behind me, but up towards the sky, towards that one point above me where the lightning had been drawn. And then it exploded, the light so bright I was blinded. I felt the force of the explosion deep in my chest and my bones, jarring me, throwing me back. When my vision returned, the lightning was gone. The skies were stormy and gray and threatening rain, but they weren't purple with criss-crossed light. The world was now tinted back to reality. A reality where good people lay crushed in the street under the rubble of buildings, dead among the belongings that had been blown out through the broken walls: at my feet I saw a black and white photograph, a broken wooden chair, bloody sneakers. It was silent now in a neighborhood that used to be alive.

  This was the world now.

  I could still hear screams in the distance. I could still smell burning. There were still staccato bursts of gunfire. I'd changed nothing but the force in the sky focused on eradicating people lying helpless and asleep. I could think of no other reason to focus on the buildings instead of the war. There was no sense to it. There was no sense to any of it. I felt rough stones under my feet and looked to see that I was standing on the ground again, no longer propelled in the air. I had used everything I had, every pulse of energy in my body. I felt my knees buckle, and I fell forward, but someone caught me.

  “I got you, sis,” said Gage.

  “I did it,” I rasped. “I saved Sofi.”

  He hefted me up, carrying me. “You sure did, Niki,” he said. “You did pretty goddamn good.”

  I looked up at Gage. He had a determined look on his face as he carried me through the door. And when he looked down at me, his expression wasn't of fear. It was pride.

  Six

  Gage set me down when we got to the front door of my apartment. It was unlocked, just as Eli had left it. I hobbled in, fending off Gage's help. Sofi was on her back on the couch, an afghan tucked around her. She looked peaceful. Her small torso moved with every breath, her aged face relaxed.

  I knelt on the floor next to her. I hadn't realized how hard it had been to breathe until just now. I exhaled and when I breathed in it felt as if it were the first breath after being underwater for a long time. I felt lightheaded and closed my eyes. I could feel the power in my chest. It hadn't left me, but it was docile and very small. I rested my cheek on the couch next to Sofi.

  “Sis?” said Gage after a moment. I turned slowly, my muscles aching. Gage was peering through the curtains.

  “What is it?” I said.

  “There's no lightning,” he said. He shook his head. “None. Completely gone. What do you think that means?”

  “It means,” I said, “that we're safe for a little while. Can you help me get Sofi into her bed?”

  “Do you really think it's safe?” Gage said as he lifted the frail woman and carried her carefully through the hall. He lowered my godmother into her bed. I pulled the covers down and over her tiny, birdlike body.

  “For now,” I said. “But can you start working on something to protect this place? We can't carry her to the Deep Blue Sea. Can you make it invisible, or put one of those protection spells on it?”

  “I can try,” said Gage. “But, Niki, this ain't like fooling humans. These are Heaven and Hell types. They see right through my casting. I could do what I did to the two of us to get us here, but you know how much energy it took just for the two of us. Imagine for a whole house. And it would only be for a little while.”

  “Maybe there's another way,” I said.

  “I'll work on it,” he said. He left the room, muttering to himself. I closed the door behind him and sagged against it. I was so weak it felt as though I had died and been brought back again. I made it to Sofi's bed and lay down next to her. I stared at her. I would do anything to keep this woman safe. It scared me.

  Maybe dying again was the only answer. If I gave up my life publicly in front of the angels, it might show that Sam did indeed honor the Creator's power, and it would eliminate the original reason for the war. Michael would probably come up with a new story to spin against Sam, but if the angels were conflicted about fighting, maybe they would drop their support for the war.

  Maybe.

  I looked at Sofi. I wanted to keep all my childhood memories of growing up with her, even if it meant I would have to stay in one place and never cross over. I didn't want to become an empty spirit like the rest of the ghosts, even if it meant reliving my death over and over. But it probably couldn't be here. I couldn't very well die a public death, visible to all of the angels, in this apartment.

  I reached out for Sofi's hand. It was cold and tiny and fragile in mine. An image of a little girl's face flashed: My mother's face as a child. I let go of Sofi's hand. I remembered the other images, when Eli had touched me, and Bobby. But when Gage had carried me in just now, I'd seen nothing. I looked down at my clothes. Maybe skin had to touch skin. I hadn't been hallucinating, I'd been seeing their memories. I closed my eyes and sighed. Coming back from the dead was astronomically overrated.

  Sofi had never told me she knew my mother as a child. My arm moved of its own volition to again take Sofi's hand. Color images exploded in my mind, like flipping quickly through photographs, but with emotions attached. Sometimes I was able to linger over one or another, but most of the images moved very quickly.

  I saw Sasha, a young man and handsome. He was hugging my mother. They looked into each others' eyes lovingly. The next was a funeral. Everyone in formal black. Someone was extending towards me—or, rather, towards Sofi—a white rose. A ship, dirty and full of people. A tiny, windowless room lined with tables of sewing machines. This very apartment, empty and new. And then the memories changed. They grew brighter. Newer, maybe. Or maybe the tone changed. I saw myself, a tiny child, holding Sasha's hand. Me, playing with an old organ keyboard. Me, going to the school bus for the first time. Me, smiling. Me crying. Me at Sasha's trial, my face conflicted. Me sitting by the window looking pensive. My first day of college, looking happy as I headed for the door. Me, showing off the name on the door of the tiny office when I'd started my PI business. Me sitting in court at my own show trial as an Abnormal, my face stormy with anger. Me, the day I'd seen Sofi in the hospital and told her we wouldn't have to worry about money any more. Me waving goodbye as she went to visit her niece. A hospital, but one I didn't recognize. A doctor looking grave. Scheduling a date for surgery.

  I dropped Sofi's hand. She was sick. The cancer was back. The memories seemed to be key moments in her life, but nearly everything I had seen had been about me. Was I really so important to Sofi that she would define her life around me? I knew at once the answer was yes. But I had never realized it until now. I was Sofi's defining moment. My life was what she was most proud of. Hot tears welled up in my eyes and the taste of salt filled my mouth. She hadn't gone to Karen's. She had gone to the hospital. She didn't want to tell me she was dying.

  I sobbed next to Sofi's sleeping body. “Damn it, Sofi,” I whispered thickly. “Why do you have to be so goddamn good?” I had to be here when she woke up. If I died while she slept, when she woke —if she woke—she would be devastated. I was her daughter, not by b
lood, but because she loved me as much as any mother would ever love a daughter. I was the thing she was proudest of doing, in her whole life. Me. I almost laughed, but it was too damn tragic.

  I pulled the covers over her hands. As long as our skin didn't touch, I would be fine. I curled around Sofi's frail body and slept.

  I woke to shots being fired outside. I blinked for a minute and got my bearings. My stomach growled loudly. I needed food. I looked at Sofi for a little while, willing her to open her eyes. I gave her a hug, careful not to touch her skin, and just stayed there for a minute.

  “I don't know if you can hear me, Sofi,” I said into her ear. “But I love you. Everything is for you. I'm living for you. I'll do what it takes to stay alive.”

  When I walked into the kitchen, two somber faces looked up at me over coffee mugs.

  “Hey, Nik,” said Eli.

  “We made coffee,” said Gage. “Want some?”

  “Oh, God yes,” I said. He poured me a cup and I sat down at the table. “What's happened?” I said. I took a drink. How had I survived without coffee the day before?

  “I'm supposed to bring you back,” said Eli. “To the Deep Blue Sea.”

  “Why?” I said, afraid of what the answer would be.

  “Sam wants you there. He's worried. You broke something. Something about the lightning. He's dead afraid that Michael's going to find out. Says you have to go to Hell right away. What happened?”

  Gage snorted. “Bastards were killing humans with the lightning,” he said. “It only attacked buildings and whatnot. Niki here stopped it.”

  “What do you mean she stopped it?” said Eli. “That thing from the sky that was exploding skyscrapers?”

  “Yep,” said Gage. “You should have seen it. It was amazing. Our girl's damn powerful.”

  “Did I make things worse?” I said.

  “Don't know,” said Eli. “I think Sam was just glad to hear you were alive. He's been pacing since you left. Kept saying, Shouldn't have let her go.” Eli took a sip of his drink. Avoiding my gaze he said, “So, what's going on between you two?”