I was suddenly thankful for the fact that I hadn’t had the luxury of meeting the man thus far.
Camael had been more than enough. Meeting someone whose extra-curriculars comprised of sword-fighting demons to the death didn’t really seem like the best way to prolong my already jeopardized lifespan.
The door to one of the confessionals opened quietly and out walked one of the priests donned in black. Probably no older than his mid-forties, he quickly took notice of my disheveled appearance.
“Welcome to St. Christopher’s,” he said as he stuffed his hands into his pockets and walked over to me. “Is there something the Church can help you with this evening, child?”
My body language mirrored his as my anxiety drove my hands into the depths of my jacket pockets. “I’m not sure,” I admitted as my gaze lifted upward to meet his, deciding it was easiest to start with the truth. “I’m looking for someone.”
The priest stared at me curiously. “Are they missing?”
“Possibly.” I pulled my jacket tighter around me, but a chill permeated the fabric even within the warm building.
“And you thought that this person, who may or may not be missing, would be somewhere within our halls?”
I couldn’t tell if he thought me crazy or not, but I had no alternatives. “I honestly don’t know, Father, but I had nowhere else to go,” I said, hoping to prey on his humility.
The older man nodded. “I understand. The house of the Lord is not a place to turn away those in need. We have a kitchen in the back. I’ll heat us up some soup and a pot of tea.”
“Oh, that won’t be necessary.” I tried to stop the man. “Honest. I just need to find my friend.”
“And find him you will,” the priest replied, “but you can’t fight demons on an empty stomach, let alone angels.”
I gawked, and he realized he’d struck a nerve. The feeling of being in a game where I didn’t fully understand the rules seemed to hover behind me like a malevolent shadow, like a waking nightmare I couldn’t escape.
“Come,” he beckoned me to follow as he circumscribed the grand altar and made his way to the back section of the church where only clergy were allowed. This man knew far more than I had originally expected, but did he know anything that would help me?
My only choice was to follow.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“You’re probably wondering why I said what I did.” Father Duncan handed me two large bowls and spoons and nodded in the direction of a hideaway table that only seated two.
I sat the items down on the placemats, the porcelain blue color an ideal comparison to the chill in my soul. Like Alice, farther and farther down the rabbit hole I went. I shoved my hands back into my pockets and shrugged at the priest. “I’m quickly becoming accustomed to the fact that I’m a part of something where I’m the only one left in the dark.”
“In the dark, aptly put.” He put some finishing touches on the stew before bringing it over to where a potholder sat between us on the table. “It doesn’t bother you that others know you better than you know yourself?”
I shrugged again as he handed me my bowl, and it wasn’t long before I shoved a large spoonful of the stew into my mouth. For some reason, I couldn’t honestly remember the last time I’d eaten anything. There was the latte in the cafe, but when had that been?
Three days ago? Three months? Years? There was a wide, gaping chasm of memories and thoughts I couldn’t put my finger on, like it had all been stirred into one ambiguous blur.
Only one thing remained constant: Adam. He was there in every image, every afterthought. I simply had to close my eyes, and he was haunting me from his damnation.
“Stop.”
“What?” I looked up, my mouth full of food.
“That thing you’re doing.” He nodded at me and set down the spoon, letting it clang against the bowl. “Feeling guilty.”
“I— I wasn’t—” I stared at him uneasily. Was everyone able to read my thoughts?
“Trapped. Powerless. Guilty,” he mused. “Whatever you want to call it, and no, I can’t read your thoughts any more than anyone else could.”
It was a good thing I had already chewed and swallowed my food, otherwise it might have landed on the table.
Father Duncan frowned and loosened the Roman collar from around his throat, setting it down on the table beside him. “Let me try and explain this. I am no psychic, nor am I a telepath. You, dear Amelia, have thoughts and emotions like a beacon in the darkness. I don’t want to hear you, but I don’t have a choice.”
“Does that mean even people on the street can hear me?” I forced another bite into me, fully aware that future opportunities for a meal could be few and far between if I didn’t get a handle on time.
“There’s a good possibility.” He smiled at me again, doing his best not to alarm me in any way. He took another hearty spoonful of stew himself. “It’s something you’ll have to work on if you are going to survive down there.”
Again my eyes met his in an instant. “There?”
Father Duncan nodded. “Hell. Purgatory. Whatever you want to call it.”
I tried to keep my pulse steady. My chest already ached with anxiety. “I thought there was a difference between the two.”
He sat back into the chair and wiped his mouth with the cloth napkin beside his bowl. “There is, if you want to get technical, but the main thing you’ll need to focus on is finding Adam.”
A laugh escaped my lips. “So you do know who I am.”
“I would be a bad Catholic if I didn’t,” he answered.
For a moment we sat there, saying nothing, but simply staring at each other. Truthfully I didn’t know where to start, what to ask. I just continued to eat until I did. “Why don’t I remember anything?” I finally broke the silence, the hot stew hitting my stomach like a ton of bricks. Perhaps though, it was just my nerves.
“You will. In time,” he said simply. “Several millennia’s worth of memories don’t come rushing back all at once. It’s going to take some time.”
I pushed myself away from the table and stood up, filling my lungs with as much oxygen as I possibly could. I hadn’t even done anything yet.
I felt a rough hand turn me about; Father Duncan was inches from my face. “Perhaps I’m not the best person to help you through this right now.” He let go of me suddenly only to snatch a thick black pea coat from the coat-rack near the window.
Within seconds, he had bundled himself with a bright red scarf tucked around his stubbled neck and a wool beanie hiding his salt and pepper hair.
“There’s someone I think you should meet.”
Ω
A rush of arctic air blasted us as soon as we pushed open the back door to the rectory, freezing us to the core as I struggled to chase after Duncan. In the time since entering the church, dusk had fallen, and with it so had the salt on the roads and sidewalks.
I fought to keep pace with him each step of the way. “So where are we going?”
“To see a friend.” He didn’t even bother to look back at me.
“And this friend . . .?” Thrusting my hands in my pockets did little without gloves. The cold made them ache in a way I hadn’t imagined. I couldn’t remember the last time I had felt this cold. So many firsts it seemed.
A streetlight nearly distracted me from my cares, flickering just long enough before finally going out. Father Duncan paid it no mind, or if he did, he made no outward showing of it.
“What kind of friend?”
“Like I said,” he said briskly, “someone far more equipped to handle this sort of thing.”
This sort of thing. How many sort of things could there be, really? How many people were living incarnations of biblical figures that were being stalked by angels?
Eden. As hard as I tried, I could not remember a damn thing about it. Not a sight. Not a sound. Not a smell. Not even the faintest glimmer of recollection, but it didn’t matter. I had seen the wings for myself.
I realized that it didn’t matter what I believed: Eden. Angels. God. Hell. My faith would change nothing.
“Eve,” I heard Father Duncan call to me even though only Camael had called me such.
My eyes darted to meet his. “Does this mean that I’m damned, too? That God really hates me? Did I really do all those—?”
He laughed. “Easy, child. I’m sure the truth won’t be as bad as it seems.” The older man’s vain attempt to comfort me failed with the fact that I was the second oldest soul in the universe. It seemed somewhat foolish to take advice from someone several millennia younger than myself.
Duncan stared at me, knowing the endless cacophony of noise bouncing around in my head and said nothing but simply kept walking. Snow pelted us as we made our way down Bricker St., one of the oldest streets in the city.
After what seemed like hours, we came upon an old industrial building, its old, metal door rusting peacefully as Duncan held it open for me. I crossed through the threshold, the temperature warming rapidly once we were inside.
Whatever life this place had during its heyday, there was almost no trace of it now. Everywhere around me there were small, two-seater tables and a smattering of secondhand couches. In the far back corner of the room, a man sat in one of the chairs beneath one of the wrought iron wall sconces dully lighting the place.
If one could even call him a man.
I glanced at Duncan who simply nodded, and I slipped on ahead past him.
The closer I got I realized what it was about the man that didn’t sit right. It was his entire face, his entire being. Like a skyscraper on the horizon, he loomed ever larger. By the time I stood less than a stone’s throw away, it was evident that he had to be upwards of 275 and almost 7 feet tall. But it wasn’t his overwhelming girth that sent me into stunned silence.
Endless spider webs of burns and raised flesh covered his skin as if something got ahold of him and clawed its way across his face from the inside out. Where his hair should have been, there were only knobs of flesh, like dreadlocks sculpted by children out of modeling clay. “This is a friend?” I couldn’t help but gawk.
Duncan slid out of the white-speckled pea coat, folding it neatly before laying it over the back of the couch. “Yes, he is.”
“This is the guy who can help?” I couldn’t hide the disbelief in my voice.
“Easy, love. I don’t bite.” The man sounded like someone who had survived on bourbon and Camels for far too many years.
Duncan sat down on the lounge chair beside the man and pointed to the adjacent one. “Sit down. There’s a lot to discuss and not a lot of time. Whatever you did really has both sides of the fence jumping.”
“I’m sorry?” I stood there, dumbfounded by them both.
“You. Sit. Down,” the creature mocked.
“Are you sure this guy can help?”
“Yes,” Duncan nodded dramatically, bobbing his head slowly and deliberately as he pulled out a cigarette from the metal case stuffed in his chest pocket. “This is Goat. Goat, this is Amelia.”
“Goat? You have to be kidding me.”
Goat took a cigarette from Duncan, both of them using their own lighters, and the area was suddenly awash in smoke. “You’re going to be an obstinate little shit, aren’t you? A real peaches and cream.”
“And apparently you’re going to help me free Adam?”
“Do you know how to beat the Seraphim?”
My arms unintentionally crossed. “And what help you can be, Goat?”
“I’ve been there,” he answered simply. “Many times.”
“Been where?” I asked, reluctantly dropping into a seat. They were both staring at me by this point. I obviously wasn’t getting the picture, unable to connect the dots.
“Hell, lovey,” he said, grinning widely at my dumbfounded face. “And I can tell you they’re jumping at themselves for a chance at you.”
A waitress with a snake for a tongue walked up to us with a serving tray and passed us a round of drinks, forcing one into my hand without permission.
“Excuse me,” I yelled when she began to turn away. “I didn’t order anything.”
A cough erupted from Goat. “No, I did.”
“How did you—”
Father Duncan shook his head disappointedly at me. “Didn’t I tell you that you were like a beacon? You’d be amazed what you can hear when you listen.”
At that moment I realized everyone in the room was staring at me, each of them more obscene and grotesque than the last. It was very apparent that I had walked into a room of freaks with me being the headliner. The increasing glares meant they had heard that too.
“The first thing you need to realize about us, dolly,” Goat mused, “is that you need to watch whatcha say—and even whatcha think. If we can hear everything that little hamster wheel of yours is rattling around, then your feathered friends will roll through you like butter.”
The Seabreeze in my hand suddenly looked inviting, so I took the largest swig I could manage, gulping down nearly the whole thing in a matter of seconds. The vodka burnt my nostrils, causing me to shake my head in disagreement with it. “Woo, that’s strong.”
“Of course it is. It’s a hundred and eighty proof and nearly two hundred years old,” Goat laughed as he poured himself another splash of bourbon. “Were you expecting something shittier?”
“I— I don’t know,” I stammered as my eyes darted back and forth across the room. It seemed that our conversation had become the main attraction. “Something that doesn’t taste like muddled piss. I can tell you that.”
The bloated scars at the edges of his eyelids upturned jovially as his laughing began anew. “I like this one, Dunc,” he said to the priest. “She’s a real firecracker. Might ’ve half a spitting chance.”
Ω
“There’s three things you need to know if you’re going to survive a war with the White Wings,” Goat said as he stepped around me and the clearing we had made in the center of the room.
All of the patrons had either cleared out of the place or stood behind the bar on the far side of the room. “Out of harm’s way,” Goat had said. But out of harm’s way from what?
Before I had long to wonder, a small, pixie-haired blonde scurried around the two of us, her two hands pouring a container of white crystals in a circle around us.
My eyes darted to Goat’s. “Salt?”
“Sea salt to be precise,” the man answered, another cigarette burning steadily from his lips.
“What do you need that for?”
“Protection.” Burning embers fell to the floor.
“Protection from what?”
The look on everyone’s face, including Duncan’s, said me. I tried to take a step forward, but my body immediately froze, unable to move. “I thought you were here to help me.”
Another drag. “I am.”
“So why are you caging me in like some rat?” I tried to take another step, this time to the left. The same result, I was penned in.
Goat slid off the closest barstool and stepped outside the ring containing me. “More like a bird, sweetheart. Just because your wings are broke, don’t mean you can’t fly.”
The tension in my back eased just a bit. “Are we talking figuratively or literally?”
The gnarled man took one final drag and dropped the butt to the ground, stomping it into the concrete with his boot. “Have you ever heard of Dante Alighieri, dollface?”
His terms of endearment were really starting to get old. “Are you talking about the Inferno guy?”
He nearly balked at me, his black eyes darting to Duncan’s. “This is what’s wrong with America’s youth. Cell phones and internet porn.”
I shot him a twisted look. “And I’m sure you’re the King of Morality.”
He snorted and stepped into the circle, an audible hiss echoing quietly as he did. I could feel the circle buzzing with energy like an electric fence, and I was scared to step back across its threshold.
He snatched it from my side. Before I had the chance to protest, he’d already drawn a small blade across the fleshy pulp of my hand. Blood pooled to the surface as I watched for any reaction from him.
There was none. It was all business.
At least that was reassuring.
I wondered if, like Adam, Camael, and the others, the patrons here were far from human. The look coming from Goat’s direction answered my question for me.
He was right. I had to figure out a way to contain my thoughts, an extremely difficult process when I didn’t even know I was broadcasting half the time. If Goat and the others in the cafe were demons, did that make me one of them? If I was an enemy of angels and cast out of Heaven, did that mean I had a place in Hell? Is that why Goat was so willing to help me—because I was one of his own, a damned soul without any hope for salvation? Questions whizzed through my mind, each one more confusing than the last.
A sturdy hand gripping my shoulder brought me back to reality, or at least the one I knew. Goat looked at me in earnest, his black pupils staring right into the core of me. But for once, I was not afraid. Somehow I knew there was nothing to fear from this mutilated imitation of a man.
“I want you to pay attention to this,” he said as he turned my palm face down and let three drops of blood fall to the ground between our feet. Almost instantly, the borders of the circle flared up around us, an ice-blue veil dancing incandescently around the two of us.
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught a glimpse of black writing scratched into the stone floor. Circumscribing the entire area, letters snaked their way around the circle’s edge until they encircled the entire distance. Light emanated from the scrawled words, the lettering foreign and archaic.
I stared down at the lettering in awe, never having seen such a thing before. “What language is this?”
Goat still held onto my hand, not even bothering to meet my gaze as he studied the ground. “Enochian.”
“Enochian?” The wonder had not left my voice.
“It’s the language of your feathered friends up there.”
FALL FROM PARADISE Page 6