She would either tell him to go fuck himself, and she would find another embodiment, or she’d suck it up and deal with it. Angel was absolutely hoping she sucked it up, because he was having too much fun pissing her off.
Her grimace was a failed attempt at a soothing smile. “Kovak, we need to talk. You two wait here.” A long, black polished nail almost poked Angel’s eye. She stormed out of the room with a smirking Martan trailing behind her. Apparently, he was enjoying her discomfort too.
Four gorillas remained, one in each corner, legs apart and machine guns at the ready over their chests.
Malachi moved closer to him. “What are you doing?”
Angel pushed him onto one of the sofas, straddled him and drawled loud enough for the guards to hear him, “Neckin' time!” He hissed in Malachi’s ear, “Just follow my lead.”
A sweet kiss ending in a bitten lower lip was followed by, “I don’t think what you’re doing is wise, baby.”
“That might be true, but I just hate that woman from the get go. I can’t help it. Vibes, remember?” He returned to the kissing and the biting. He was going to give the guards a show if the countess took too long to come back.
“I didn’t know I was your boyfriend.” Malachi got sidetracked and stared at him, waiting for a response. His dark eyes beamed, belying his outer concern.
“If you don’t like the title, we can leave it at fuck buddy.” Angel was sure “boyfriend” had shocked Countess Tau more than if he had said “fuck buddy.”
“I wasn’t complaining. It was just unexpected. Since we never had such a conversation, and we don’t know where we might be tomorrow.” Caressing Angel’s cheek, Malachi added, “She could kill us.”
“Nobody dies before their day to leave the land of the living. I refuse a life afraid of Death when, under normal circumstances, something could still happen at any moment. A car accident, a piano falling from a building. So many random ways to go. Tomorrow is not promised to any man.”
“I hope you’re not citing the Bible, because that thing is not there.”
“Whoa, you know what some of ‘em hardcore readers of the Good Book would do to us if they found us in this position.”
“Nah, nowadays it will just be some posters with the word HATE thrown on them at a demonstration.”
“Well, stick my dick in a fan, I have a big poster with the letters F and U for the countess.”
“I heard that,” She hissed, entering the room.
Luckily for Angel, he had never broken character.
Martan didn’t know what Angel was planning, but he liked it. Tau was so bent out of shape that she burned to start throwing things left, right and center. She deserved every bit of disconformity Life handed her for being such a raging bitch.
It wasn’t anybody’s fault that she couldn’t deal with everyday people, and Angel had captured her essence with one look. For her, handling people she considered beneath her was an extreme burden. And for whatever snob reasoning, she had assumed Angel if not her equal, at least intellectually, was challenging enough to entertain her.
That asinine supposition had blown brilliantly on her face. Martan, who could have forgiven her attitude when they were green and naïve, was enjoying every minute of this mental setback. He felt vindicated since her little tantrum had been in his presence, when she had done everything in her power to avoid and ignore him beyond necessity until today. Of all days, because there wasn’t a higher person in the house besides knighted Malachi Neun, and, with stolid joy, Martan had let her rant in the same manner one would disregard a misbehaving child.
She slapped him and, in return, he French-kissed the hell out of her, just to make her lose more of her already disheveled composure, and it saddened him how in need of human contact she was that she hadn’t pushed him away.
The stupid woman needed love, but she didn’t have the necessary equipment to make Martan happy. Perhaps her heart, which had allowed her moronic brain to guide her through life, was as far from repair as a dead albatross. Only a champion would have the strength to salvage her wrecked soul.
Even if he didn’t have the inclination or desire to help her in that way, he could never forget they were each other’s first. Such knowledge should make him have a smidge of pity for her. Lamentably, it hadn’t.
Now, Martan readied himself to take front seat and devour a humongous bucket of popcorn, adjusting his 3D glasses to bask in the upcoming show: Dixie Drawl vs. The Raging Countess.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“You can say the words in any language, as long as you visualize the doors opening and what army you want out.”
“What if I say banana and imagine the door, ma’am?”
“It doesn’t work that way because banana doesn’t mean door in any language.”
The infuriated emoticon in her mental text was about to explode. Angel could see the vein throbbing on her temple.
“And what army do I want again, ma’am?”
Angel noticed her effort not to stamp her foot and slap him. (After all) he was on his knees at the appropriate distance to receive the hit, making a diagram to produce the doors of the gate on the temple’s ground with a broken piece of clay from what he assumed was an ancient pot.
“You want the Spartan Army that defeated Xerxes.”
“Oh my, like the movie?”
She almost growled, “Angel, after Leonidas was killed, the elders used a gate to summon an army. I need you to focus on the elders’ requested spiritual army.”
Many spotlights had been rearranged to illuminate the area where Angel worked, obliterating the full moon above them. It made him sweat like the proverbial pig, even if he knew for a fact that real pigs didn’t sweat a lot, and that’s why they wallow in the fucking mud so happily.
But a go-go boy was used to being in the limelight, so in a Septima Luna’s-fifteen-minute-break moment of inspiration, he took off his shirt and flung it triumphantly toward one of the armed trolls on his periphery. It landed on his helmet (like an ill-fitting mantilla), and Angel saw the other guards’ trembling shoulders trying to hold their laughter at their comrade’s expense.
Angel scratched his head, pasting the most puzzled face he could command. “Ma’am?”
“What now?”
“If this open sesame thing works, what am I doing with the army again?”
“You’re getting on my last nerve.” She made a signal, and the guards flanking Malachi kicked him on the back of his knees and Malachi crumbled. The butt of a machine gun found his head. “If you have a shred of intelligence within you, you’ll stop your nonsense right this second.”
He sprang and poked her sternum with his forefinger. “Listen carefully, you sodding bitch. They touch him again, and the only coordinates that fucking army is going to find is inside your bleached ass. Let him go.” He marched toward Malachi and pushed the helmet-covered faces of the two guards with his hands, making them stagger in their surprise.
By the time every guard reacted and all weapons aimed at them, Tau yelled, “Don’t.”
Malachi wobbled, helped by Angel, toward where the doors had been drawn. “He stays by my side, and you control your gorillas,” he hissed when she was within hearing distance. “Or I’ll use your own weapons against you.”
The pallor on her face showed she had understood loud and clear. She nodded, her eyes narrowed and menacing.
“Are you all right, sweetie?” Angel let Malachi crouch beside him.
“Where is your heavy accent?”
“Gone with the bitch, darlin’.”
The chuckle squeezed Angel’s heart. His resolution to destroy Juggernaut grew firmer. He would use their own army to destroy their headquarters and every single motherfucker within it. The twenty thousand possessed soldiers would make the place confetti in seconds, and then he simply sent back the spiritual army to limbo or released them of their duty, whatever stroked his fancy by the time it was done.
“You.” Angel pointed at Tau, his
eyes narrowed. “Move away. Your face irritates me.”
She glared at him and stepped backward until she was stopped by Martan holding her upper arms and keeping her plastered against his massive chest. She resisted for a second, then stood motionless but never defeated; her furious scowl screamed it.
Using up the abandoned piece of clay, Angel united the bottom lines of the traced opening. He put a hand on each door and concentrated.
“Open gate of wonders and bring me the ghost army the elders of Sparta summoned to avenge the death of Leonidas at Thermopylae. The soul of revered Antinous Ephebus, beloved of Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus commands it.”
Angel chanted this for a while, deciding to hold Malachi’s hand and visualizing immense doors (like a cathedral’s) slowly moving open to spill their secrets, over and over again.
A rumor similar to a billion exhausted sighs resonated around them. The clay-outlining emanated a golden glow, its light becoming brighter and brighter by the second, and the ground shook. More than side to side, it trembled in an up and down undulating exhalation.
Until that moment, something inside Angel had hoped this hinky situation was just a bunch of malarkey. That everything was nothing but the opium dreams of mad people. Now, as the earth spread, spewing a vomit green glare, Angel steeled his heart to conquer his destiny (definitively not the time to poop his pants), because the screeches coming from the gate were bloodcurdling.
It was Julius Caesar who said “no one is so brave that he isn’t disturbed by something unexpected”, and this shit surely was bewildering.
The first ghostly figure emerged amidst the puke-like radiance, nothing was discernible but a head and shoulders, the rest of the body was an elongated amoeba. Angel shouted “The soul of revered Antinous Ephebus, beloved of Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus, commands you.”
With a short bow, the apparition acknowledged him and floated toward him, giving berth to the next surfacing soul. The yelp of the first stricken guard made Angel lose some of his concentration, and as more guards fell to the rattling ground, he heard it above the shrieks from the opening.
In similar but green SWAT outfits, men zip lined from almost silent hovercrafts. Malachi gurgled, hit by something and let go of Angel’s grasp, his hands searching his neck. Angel forgot about the spirits and the door and the destruction of Juggernaut, Malachi could not leave him there like that.
“Kai!” Angel beat Malachi’s chest with closed fists. “No, no, no.”
Someone grabbed him by the waist; he trashed and kicked, screaming to return to Malachi. Was that blood on Malachi’s mouth? No, this couldn’t be happening. He would go insane.
As he was pulled to a hovercraft, he saw the green SWATS overpowering the black SWATS. The first luminous apparition did something that Angel could only associate with a shrug and returned to the glowing hole, pushing the other entities down as if they were impertinent children trying to escape a radiantly fenced play yard. The gate morosely closed, its creepy lights and noises becoming mute. The Neolithic stone complex turned into an amorphous shadow below him. He could not find a trace of Martan or the countess; he could only distinguish Malachi’s unmoving body at an odd angle in the middle of the chaos, shrinking until it was nothing but the luminous drop of a bad memory.
“It will be fine.” The man holding him said in what Angel supposed was a soothing voice; as comforting as a voice coming through a tricked-out motorcycle helmet could be.
Still, the voice seemed familiar, but Angel didn’t care.
As Angel was tucked into the back of a hovercraft, all he wanted was for this to be his day to leave the land of the living and be back on Mnajdra, dying beside Malachi.
“He’s not responding to any treatment.”
“I’m so sorry, Hugo,” Snyder murmured, giving him a light hug.
“There’s nothing physically wrong with him. It’s like he lost his will to live."
“Maybe it was a shock too great for him. You told me how he reacted when you rescued him.”
“This boy is really strong, Snyder. You have no idea the things he’s gone through. He’s a fighter.”
“There’s something more, then. Something you don’t know, affecting him deeper than before.”
“Yeah, I do have my suspicions. I just hope that’s not the case, because it’s gonna get worse as we reveal all the truth.”
“Spare the kid. Sometimes you don’t need the whole picture. Give him time to heal, at least.”
“He’s not a coward. He’ll want an explanation.”
“Let’s get out of here. Not the place for this conversation.” Snyder grabbed Hugo’s arm and towed him to exit the room.
A tiny voice croaked behind them, “Wait.”
Hugo got frozen at the door.
How much had Angel heard?
Shrugging Snyder off, Hugo almost knocked out the IV attached to Angel in his haste. “How are you, sweetie?” He caressed the boy’s forehead.
Angel didn’t open his eyes. “Hugo?”
“Yes. You want some water?” Stall. Delay. Deny.
His little friend, his charge, had lost weight and had the pallor of the comatose. No one can keep up being fed by tubes.
“What is it? What I need… to know?” The croak gained force. It seemed as if Angel was about to sit up.
“Let’s wait ‘til you’re out of bed to have a nice, long chat. Okay?” Hugo patted a ghostly cheek.
“Mhh …kay.” Angel deflated and the monitors started to beep, annoyingly excited.
Out of nowhere, a nurse pushed Hugo aside, tossing an apology at him. By the time he was able to completely react, Snyder was pulling him out of the room and into the crowded hallway, where people moved with unhurried efficiency.
Fuck.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“I don’t believe you.”
“Why would I lie?”
“Well,” Angel shrugged, “in the same way you’ve been around me most of my life, and you led me to think we met for the first time when you found me all battered up on that sidewalk.”
“There was a reason for that.”
“There’s always one, but that doesn’t mean it’s logical or true. You didn’t intervene when my father abused me.”
“Would you be the man you’re today if I had?”
“Probably not.”
“Would you be strong as you are?”
“I see your point.”
“I couldn’t interfere, just kept an eye on you, in case Juggernaut approached you.”
“What about that idiot I ran away with? Couldn’t you gimme a signal he was a piece of shit?”
“Again, no intervention. I did rescue you when you were out of his grasp.”
“By my own decision.”
“As it should always be. Your decision.”
They sat in their apartment after almost three weeks of hospital convalescence in France. Hugo had conjured a passport for him to board the 787, and Angel hoped another Japan (when the fucking airbus fell like crow poop) didn’t happen.
He remembered wishing he could go with Malachi, but now he had another thing in mind.
“You need to go back to school,” Hugo commented, sipping his mate.
“I missed too many days already,” Angel glared profusely, “and don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not.” The mug lay forgotten as Hugo moved to retrieve something from the massive credenza occupying most of an entire wall of their living room. He turned and offered a piece of paper to Angel. “Here. Your doctor’s note. I’ve been in contact with your teachers so they know you were sick.”
“School can wait. Who’s higher than Chico?”
“What do you mean?”
“I want to talk with someone higher than Chico at the Brotherhood.”
Hugo gave him an unexpected answer. “That can be arranged.”
“Good. You sure he didn’t die?”
“I told you. We don’t kill people un
less we’re forced to. I shot him myself, and it was a tranquilizer, nothing more.” Hugo arched an eyebrow. “Besides, he lied to you.”
“So did you, and I’m still here.”
“Fair enough. Let’s get ready. Some dancing will make you feel better.”
“Hugo?”
“Yes, doll?”
“I’m in love with Kai.”
The grimace and the hiss made Hugo look like some cartoon aberration (which was really hard because Hugo was truly dreamy). “I don’t think that’s a good idea, kid.”
“When have you ever heard of a smart heart?”
Hugo nodded solemnly. “Never, Angel. Never.”
“I’m going.”
“No. You’re not.”
“I need to see him. By now, they must have told him about me. I can't bear to live if he hates me.”
“Pissed off, perhaps. Hating? I don’t see Angel being a hater.”
“Not the moment for your smartass comments, Kovak.”
“You should wait until the waters recede. Tau is foaming and asking for his head.”
“It’s not like he did something wrong. She can’t blame him for that snafu.”
“She has to blame someone, doesn’t she?”
“I’d take the fall.”
“No. You’re not.”
“Seriously, what is your problem? Where is all this caring coming from?”
“I like that little spitfire. Few people don’t get intimidated by me.”
“Such a fucking softie.”
“You’re a pain in the ass, but you deserve each other. He’s a good boy.”
“Stop the honey dripping, Kovak. You’re making me sick.”
Kovak whined, “I can't bear to live if he hates me.” Then he punched Malachi on the shoulder. “Man up, we have a bitch to muzzle.”
“What?”
“We’re going to convince our beloved countess that she needs to let Angel the fuck alone.”
The frankness and the smile surprised Malachi. Then understanding dawned on him. “You loved someone.”
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