Harsh Gods

by Michelle Belanger

  “That’s not the best photo,” Bobby said, hovering at my elbow. “Skip forward a couple. We hit it with a black light.”

  The next couple of pictures just showed different angles, mostly. My finger hovered above one that gave a better view of the strangely stocked shelf. There was a large display case visible in the background. It, too, seemed crammed with artifacts from a broad range of ancient cultures. Dr. Kramer had been a busy and well-traveled man. I was about to ask whether or not he’d brought anything back from his stint in Syria—like, say, a Rephaim-inhabited statue—but then I advanced to the black light photo.

  The question died forgotten in my throat.

  Bobby caught my expression. “You recognize them.”

  The black light cast everything in ghostly shades of pallid blue. The vivid yellow of the interior wall washed out entirely. Against its now dull greenish expanse, brightly painted letters luminesced. Two lines, executed in broad, bold strokes. There was no mistaking the shapes. I still couldn’t read the ancient Luwian—but I recognized immediately the three signs that made up the name Terhuziel.

  “Fuck me running.” It was out of my mouth before I could stop myself. “Whose blood?” I felt breathless.

  Bobby hesitated. I glanced up from the photo to see an agonized expression twisting his face. He wasn’t holding back on my account. He could barely bring himself to say it. Finally, he managed to choke it out.

  “Youngest daughter. Kaylee. She was four.”

  I winced, thinking unpleasantly of Terael’s often winsome nostalgia for blood-sacrifice. If Terhuziel was Rephaim, someone had been feeding him.

  “Look, Bobby,” I began, but cut off as the phone vibrated unexpectedly in my hand. I nearly dropped it. It was a text message.

  Garrett. Two words.

  Check in.

  “Uh,” I stammered, shoving the phone in Bobby’s direction. “That’s for you.”

  Park glanced at the screen and muttered a curse.

  “I’ve got to go,” he said. “Anything you can share on that language?”

  “It’s not terrorists,” I replied.

  “Figured,” he answered darkly.

  The phone buzzed with another incoming text. I could just make it out through the glare.

  Don’t trust him

  Bobby frowned at the terse missive.

  “You sure your partner used to like me?” I ventured.

  Bobby tapped a quick response into the phone, then swept the edge of his suit jacket aside so he could clip the device back to his belt. I could see the lines of his shoulder holster. His movements were a little too abrupt.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with him,” Park replied, glancing furtively at the dark bubble of the security camera. He could no longer hold still.

  I opened my mouth, then bit back my words, wondering how much I’d trusted Bobby before I’d gotten the tabula rasa treatment. Cops made me nervous for reasons my stubborn memory refused to disclose, but Bobby had always acted like a friend—and maybe more than a friend. An ally.

  “Look. You and your partner need to be careful with this,” I offered. I kept my eyes locked on Bobby, gauging his reactions. His features grew sallow as he studied the look on my face.

  “We stepped into something bad, didn’t we?”

  “I’m not sure how much I’ll be able to tell you,” I hedged. “It’s not exactly police report material.” He barked a bitter laugh. It rang hollow in the stifling air of the tiny back hall.

  “When is it ever with you?”

  His phone started buzzing again. Repeatedly. This wasn’t a text message—it was a call. He stepped swiftly toward the door that had led us here.

  “Now I have to go,” he said, grabbing his phone.

  I nodded, heading for the outer door. I paused with it half open, wind gusting into the building. I’d stopped noticing how rank it was back here till the harshly barren scent of winter blasted in. Bobby swiped his key card at the other door.

  “Zack,” he called as I stood upon the threshold.

  “Yeah?”

  “You be careful, too.”

  Then he was through the door, phone held to one ear. From his many agitated gestures, it wasn’t a pleasant call.

  19

  I yanked off the visitor pass still clipped to the tongue of my zipper as I walked back to the Hellcat. Tossing the laminated tag onto the passenger seat, I keyed the ignition.

  “Paint it Black” picked up where it had left off, startlingly loud. Jagger wailed frenetically as the song wound down. I reached into the glove compartment and retrieved my SIG, slipping it back into its holster in the inner pocket of my jacket. The Stones faded into Tunstall’s “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree.” Drumming along with the irresistible rhythms of her throaty vocals, I sorted through everything Bobby had revealed to me—the murdered family, the missing doctor, the highly trained soldier who’d likely disappeared during some black ops in Afghanistan. His connection had to be the doctor, but what the hell had he been doing in that house?

  The black-light photo burned against the substance of my mind, its words inscrutable save for that all-too-familiar name.

  I needed to meet with Terael.

  Music blasting, I backed out of the visitor parking, threading my way past rows of off-duty cruisers and employee vehicles. It was dusk, and the leaden cloud cover that had settled over the city hastened the dying of the light. The street in front of the station was a choked river of headlights, the cars bumper to bumper in what I initially mistook for rush-hour traffic. But it was six thirty on a Saturday. Traffic shouldn’t have been this thick—at least, not going in that direction. Maybe there was some event at one of the museums. It wasn’t like I’d been keeping track of that sort of thing.

  Whatever the cause, I sat impatiently as I waited for an opening so I could pull onto Chester. While the car idled, a prickly feeling settled in the middle of my back, right between my wings.

  Someone was watching me. I could feel it as surely as if they had walked up beside me and huffed in my ear. I craned my neck.

  Garrett stood on the steps in front of the station. He had a cigarette in one hand and his phone in the other. He was still in his shirtsleeves, the cuffs rolled halfway up his tattooed forearms. Puffing a plume of curling smoke, he fixed his eyes on me. I could feel their baleful weight like corpse fingers dragging along my spine.

  He was thirty feet away, maybe more, and the windows of my vehicle were darkly tinted. There was no way he could see me—yet, the instant my eyes fixed on his in the rearview mirror, his broad, flat mouth curled into a mirthless grin. It was more a baring of teeth, one predator’s warning to another.

  What the fuck is this guy’s problem?

  Still gritting that mockery of a smile, he flicked the cigarette away. Fishing in his pocket, he brought out a curious object—a white, flat disk of ceramic or stone. About the size of a coaster, he juggled the item across the tops of his knuckles with a dexterity I found unlikely in a man of his size. Once, then twice, it made the flipping transit from his index finger to his pinky and then back again.

  With a little flourish, he tucked the disk back into his pocket.

  Something about the object—and Garrett’s casual handling of it—made my guts twist uncomfortably.

  At the first break in traffic, I gunned the motor, whipping the car onto the street and the hell away from Bobby’s weird partner. He continued to track me, though, long after I pulled away. To add ironic commentary, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds queued up from the iPod, singing of an ominous stranger and his red right hand.

  I stabbed the mute button, having had about enough stereomancy for the night.

  After the slowest half-mile ever, I caught the left onto East Boulevard and got the hell away from whatever was backing up Chester and Euclid. Trees lined the scenic parkway that wound past the lagoon, white holiday lights—long past the season—still gleaming in their naked branches. The tangle of traffic receded in my mirrors,
transitioning to something that seemed far removed from the frenetic drive of the city. Funny the difference only a couple hundred feet could make in this corner of town.

  Wade Park stretched to my left while the iconic lines of Severance Hall rose against the darkening clouds to the east. It was close to seven already, and museum hours ended at five on Saturdays. I found parking on the street and searched the glove box for my spare magnetic key card and employee ID.

  Fuck me. I didn’t have either on me.

  Probably better to avoid my co-workers on this trip, anyway. I had alternate methods for getting into the building. I pulled my cellphone out of my pocket and stashed it in the glove box. My personal back door to the museum would turn it into a useless paperweight.

  Thumbing the button on my key fob, I locked the car and armed the security system. Then I stuffed my hands into the pockets of my jacket and started walking toward the sculpture gardens. One of the most treasured pieces of CMA’s collection—a casting of Rodin’s famous Thinker—brooded front and center along the approach leading to the original 1914 entrance. Cleveland’s version of the statue was unique, one foot obliterated by a pipe bomb in the ’70s. The explosion—an act of anarchic violence credited to a group called “the Weathermen”—had forever changed the profile of the massive bronze figure.

  It had also stamped a Crossing right outside my workplace.

  Crossings were soft spots in the metaphysical barrier separating the Shadowside from the world of flesh. Stepping from one side to the other was the unique purview of my tribe, and it gave us a significant edge when dealing with spirits—which, as far as I had gathered, was one of our main functions.

  Whatever strange alchemy of timing, location, and human emotion combined to blossom into a Crossing, I could sense the supernatural doorways once they were present. Typically, a Crossing was brought about by something traumatic, and echoes of the event lingered like a stain on the psychic landscape, locked in an endless loop. Murders and other violent assaults were the most consistent causes, but—as with Rodin’s Thinker here—not all were tied directly to mortal pain.

  Every day ten thousand scenes of human conflict played out across the space of any city—murder, rape, and untold instances of cruel predation. If an extremity of human suffering was the sole cause of a Crossing, then the world would be riddled with holes.

  It wasn’t.

  That was probably a good thing.

  I took a breath and flexed. The air thickened like the skin atop boiled milk, then, with a single step, I tore through. The breath exited my lungs in a rush and my cowl shredded around me—business as usual. Maintaining my cowl on the skinside was annoying enough. On the Shadowside, it was nearly impossible.

  The landscape went monochromatic, smothered by silence. The wind, the traffic, all the noises of the city—they were just gone, as if a cosmic hand had hit mute. To my left, the Thinker exploded and became whole again in an endless cycle bleached of color and sound. Similarly, the nearby museum shuffled through snapshots of its imprinted history, layers of time and human perception locked into the rippling fabric of the Shadowside.

  I shook off the last clinging tatters of the cowl, stretching my wings to their full expanse. They weren’t flesh and blood, exactly, although they acted as if they were. They had distinct structure and musculature, and on this side of reality these were visible in outlines of gleaming bluish light. More than twice my height from tip to tip, they were a solid weight upon my back—though, fortunately, not as heavy as their size might suggest. Ghosting through my clothes, they were nevertheless real and perfectly functional.

  Rolling my shoulders and neck, I took a running leap. With a single, massive downstroke, I took to the air.

  Living flight. The Shadowside could be a grim and desolate place, but all its horrors were rendered tolerable in light of this one exhilarating treasure. If the atmosphere of this gray and haunted space weren’t so metaphysically taxing, I likely would spend most of my time here, soaring through its sunless sky.

  My jaunts, however, were curtailed by necessity. An entropic effect leached power from everything that crossed over, and that included me. The longer I lingered, the more the sere atmosphere of the place ground me down, and if I pushed myself too long—like a swimmer trapped underwater without a breathing tank—I could die. The physical bits of me, at any rate, and I wasn’t keen on finding out what happened to the rest once those withered away.

  I wheeled above the spectral echoes of a stand of ancient trees that clustered near the new entrance to the museum. Subtle currents moved through the air high above the patchwork echo of the building, and I let them do most of the work for me. Good thing, too, because the crushing psychic pressure wore me down quickly. My endurance had seriously taken a hit.

  Some of it was likely from the blood loss the night before, but the rest—well, I hadn’t exactly been taking care of myself the past few weeks. Quickly winded, I dropped to the faded ribbon of pavement outside the main entrance. I folded my wings against my back and started swiftly toward my basement office.

  That was a personal sanctuary my sibling Terael had carved out for me, and there I could safely cross back into the flesh-and-blood world, free from the many watchful eyes of the museum’s security system.

  The instant I passed through the doors, however, my disembodied sibling greeted me. It felt like the mental equivalent of being tackled by a Saint Bernard with separation anxiety.

  Have his soldiers harried you? Terael asked. So long you were absent. I feared you had abandoned me.

  His voice, eerie and atonal, rang urgently through my head—so loud that stars exploded in my vision. Images, emotions, and a spider web of lateral associations clung to his every word. The emotions were the worst, because an underlying note of naked panic shivered through everything. My heart sped with sympathetic adrenaline.

  “Whose soldiers, Terael?” I said aloud. “I wouldn’t—”

  He cut me off before I could match all the words to my completed thought. Anger, fear, and relief resounded in swift progression through my head.

  You will help me then, my brother, he said, as I so often have helped you? The agitated emotions of the resident Rephaim lent an added weight to the already suffocating air of the Shadowside.

  I staggered forward, seeking to tear free of the currents swirling through the lobby. Decades’ worth of visitors had stamped a ghostly imprint of traffic both in and out of the main doors. I had to fight not to get caught in the undertow. A gleaming monolith of chrome and Lucite offered an island of calm amid the ceaseless motion. The main donation box. To Terael, this was the equivalent of an altar where worshippers left him sacrifice—though he tended to pout that it was no longer blood, but coin.

  Pausing there, I clung for a moment to the structure—it had substance on both sides, looming even bigger on the Shadowside than in the mortal world. My vision started to tunnel—perhaps a consequence of Terael’s thundering intensity, or of getting my ass handed to me the night before. I couldn’t rightly tell.

  The Rephaim hovered impatiently along the edges of my awareness. Waves of urgent anxiety continued bleeding off of him—nothing organized enough to interpret, but still stultifying.

  “I got the memo,” I said. “Something’s wrong out there. Give me a minute to get to my office, then we can talk.”

  Relief and a surge of gratitude—both good emotions, but they didn’t much help my pounding head.

  He sent a herald within these walls, demanding that I serve or fall.

  Insult mingled with his fear. I rushed through the museum’s halls with his colossal presence bearing down on me. My thoughts grew scattered as the effort to remain on the Shadowside eroded my already dwindling reserves.

  “Who did?” I asked as I pelted along. “Who are we talking about, Terael?” I was afraid I already knew the answer. Finally, I reached the stairs that led to the basement—the elevator wasn’t exactly an option.

  Our brother Terhuz
iel, the Thunderer of the Northern Hills. Has he yet to send his soldiers to threaten you with harm?

  The blood sang in my ears.

  “You know about Terhuziel?” I croaked.

  Impatience and accusation slapped against me.

  His emissary threatened me within these very walls! I waited and I waited, but you did not come.

  There it was.

  All this time, the problem had been building, and I wallowed at home, locked away. If I’d dragged my ass out of my self-pitying funk, managed to make it to work for even one day, I could have nipped this in the bud.

  I must beg for your protection, he continued, diminished as I am. We will face his threat together and drive him from our land, will we not?

  “Fuck me running,” I hissed.

  Zaquiel?

  The Name rang like plaintive music upon the air.

  “I am such an idiot,” I snarled. Then I raced the rest of the way to my office to slam out of the Shadowside.

  20

  I emerged in a small, windowless room tucked away in a neglected corner of the museum’s basement. The walls were cinderblock, painted a dull, flat white. They were bare except for a corkboard I’d managed to stick in place with about twenty strips of double-sided tape.

  Metal shelving ran the length of the back wall, providing just enough room for me to get in and out of the swivel chair parked at my desk. The desk itself took up most of the room, and I often wondered how the staffers had gotten the metal hulk through the solitary door.

  Wadded up take-out wrappers still filled the little wire-mesh trash can, adding a slightly rancid scent to the air. Nearly a month of vacation and no one had touched the space—not even the janitors. Terael was maybe a little too enthusiastic about keeping this room a private sanctuary for me.

  “Tell me about Terhuziel,” I said, leaning against the wall by the door. My head spun from the rushed re-entry. “Do you know why he’s here? What does he want?”

  He seeks to conquer as always he has done, Terael responded bleakly.