by Bruce Blake
Here we go.
I straightened, fists clenched at my sides, and turned expecting to find Marty or Tony had followed me from Hell-Sully’s. Instead, I looked into my mother’s face. She wore the whole nuns’ get-up—black hood, white bib, black dress—and the sight of her startled me. When you’re expecting a fat, drunk guy and you get a fully decked out nun, it catches you off guard.
“Mother?”
She looked past me at Trevor slumped in the pew. I glanced back at him, too. He’d slid down a little but held his own.
“Is this...?”
“Trevor.”
She touched her lips with her fingers and stared, eyes wide.
“My grandson?”
I nodded.
“Yeah. I guess not many nuns get to say that, do they?”
I felt bad for having said it as soon as the words left my mouth. Would it remind her of how awful it must have been for her to have me? What must a pregnant nun have gone through? She probably had it worse than a priest accused of abusing a child—at least they were used to that. The thought made me look over my shoulder for a quick survey of the church.
Where’s Father Dominic?
“I wouldn’t change a thing, Icarus.”
Did she read my thoughts or infer them from my sarcasm? Could have been either. In my after-death, my thoughts had been read by more people—angels—than I felt comfortable with, one more didn’t matter.
My mother stepped forward and crouched in front of my son.
“Trevor,” she whispered into his face.
He didn’t react.
She shifted herself to perch on the edge of the pew beside him and put her hand on his cheek. Nothing happened for a few seconds and impatience built in my gut—Azrael and the boy hadn’t given me a deadline, but I felt like time grew short. My lead was shrinking, my deficit growing; I felt the need to get away as soon as possible.
I opened my mouth to hurry her along, but the flutter of Trevor’s eyelids interrupted me. His eyes opened and he gazed at the nun seated beside him as she took her hand away from his face. Trevor licked his lips like a man desperately in need of water, then pivoted his head toward me. His eyes lit up at the sight of me and his lips moved.
I’m not a very good lip reader but the lack of words coming from his mouth forced me into the role.
“Dad,” his lips said without sound.
I smiled.
“Trevor,” I replied, though I chose to actually make a noise.
He looked to my mother and back. His lips moved again but still made no sound.
“What’s wrong with him?”
My mother shook her head minutely but said nothing, leaving me feeling either deaf or the only one amongst us with the ability to speak. I knelt in front of Trevor, hands on his knees, and looked up at him.
“Say something.”
I gave him a gentle shake as if he was one of those toy cows that moo when you jostle them. His lips moved again but he neither mooed nor spoke.
“Trevor.”
My mother put her hand over mine, and when I faced her, she was looking at me with even more sadness in her eyes than usual.
“He has been through much.”
At least I’m not the last guy in the world with a voice.
Trevor’s eyes flickered back and forth between us with the smallest hint of realization showing in them. Worry fluttered in my chest.
What have I done to him.
“It’ll be okay, Trev. I’ll get you out of here.”
I stood and a knot threatened my calf but I shook it out before it took hold. After another survey of the church—the image in the stained glass window showed a distinctly more pornographic version of a not-so-virgin Mary and the Christ-on-the-cross leered like the Joker in a Batman comic—I offered Trevor my hand.
“We have to get out of here.”
He accepted my help while my mother remained perched on the edge of the pew looking up at us. Her lips pulled into a smile tinged with pain.
“Come with us.”
She shook her head, the white cotton bib of her habit brushing against the black tunic.
“No, I told you already.”
“But why not?”
She looked down at her hands in her lap, studied the way her fingers smoothed the creases in her tunic before looking up again and answering.
“I don’t deserve to be anywhere else.”
“Bullshit.”
She fixed me with a look that reminded me of Sister Mary-Therese, the kind of look meant to remind me nuns don’t like swearing.
Too bad.
“What happened wasn’t your fault,” I said.
“Wasn’t it?”
“No, it wasn’t.” I hesitated, examined her expression. “Was it?”
She shrugged, looked back at her lap again, then forced herself to keep her eyes on mine.
“One can always say no.”
“To an archangel? Do you really believe that?”
Trevor shifted at my side but I dismissed the movement as an active teen tired of standing in one spot. Instead, I concentrated on my mother, awaited her answer. I thought of my encounter with Piper in a cave in Hell. Could I have said no to her?
I didn’t want to.
Maybe I knew what she meant more than I wanted to let myself believe.
“Guilt isn’t the only reason, is it?” I asked.
She shook her head. Her eyes looked glossy, as though she teetered on the edge of tears but held them back.
“You love him.”
“Yes.”
The word held laughter and happiness, a joy I didn’t expect in her voice. The bastard angel-of-death took her from the world and condemned her to live for eternity in Hell, and here she was, happy. Didn’t make sense. Shouldn’t she be angry? Pissed off in the highest degree? I was.
Trevor shuffled his feet beside me, runners rubbing on stained carpet.
Neither my mother nor I shifted our gazes and the longer I looked into her eyes, the more I saw the love she felt for Azrael. I didn’t understand it, but there it was. I began to understand my anger came from how I felt about her being taken from the world, and her feelings had nothing to do with mine. I might go to the end of my days hating Azrael for taking my mother away, but in the end, she was happy. Probably happier than if he hadn’t. I sensed an apology bubbling up at the back of my throat so I clamped my lips shut to make sure it didn’t escape.
I wasn’t quite ready to give up my anger.
Trevor moved again and this time my mother glanced away. When she did, her eyes widened and the flicker of love I’d seen in them disappeared. Not what you expect from a grandmother gazing upon her grandson.
Crap.
I felt the hand on my shoulder and caught the whiff of singed hair before turning my head. With the pressure of the touch on me and the odor in my nostrils, I didn’t really need to look to see who’d taken Trevor’s place beside me.
“Father Dominic,” I said doing my best to sound nonchalant. He stood close, invading my personal space. Trevor looked on from the other side of him, safe for now, it seemed. Dominic smiled his sharp-toothed, blood-smeared smile. “What are you doing here?”
“You have to take me back.”
“Haven’t we already had this conversation?”
His grip tightened; I gritted my teeth, determined not to show pain.
“Let me rephrase,” the hellish priest said through clenched teeth. “You will take me with you.”
I glanced past him at Trevor who had backed away a couple of steps, increasing his margin of safety slightly.
Good boy.
“Let me rephrase, also: no.”
The muscles of his jaw flexed beneath the medium-rare skin of his face and I swear the bumps on is forehead—horns doing their best to force their way through?—grew a little. If he’d been a cartoon, steam would have spewed from his ears. The thought almost made me giggle but the way he grabbed me by the front of my shirt and shook
me like a rat in the jaws of a terrier loosened the expression from my face.
“Take me,” he screamed, spittle flying against my cheeks.
The sides of my mouth pulled taut in an expression I probably wouldn’t have characterized as a smile. Nasty smirk maybe. Vengeful grin, perhaps.
“Fuck you.”
His forehead crunched against the bridge of my nose and pain exploded through my face. I jerked my head back already feeling warm blood on my top lip and had to blink a couple of times to clear my suddenly fuzzy vision.
“You will take me back with you. It’s your fault I’m here and you will fix it.”
I didn’t feel anything like smiling this time but I did manage to shake my head which felt like it belonged to someone else. Given the pain, I wished whoever it belonged to would take it back.
The priest shook me again, rattling my teeth. I grabbed his wrists, tried to pull his hands from my shirt but his hold on me was too solid.
“Take. Me.”
He punctuated each word with a solid jolt. My nose throbbed, blood ran into my mouth, I felt my brain slap against the inside of my skull. If I didn’t make him stop, it might end up falling out of my ear. Turns out having your thinker rattled around against your cranium isn’t the ideal situation for coming up with clever plans, so I continued attempting to pry his fingers away.
No luck.
The priest’s eyes bulged in their sockets, his lips pulled back from his teeth far enough to reveal tattered gums and shit stuck between his molars. He breathed rotten breath into my face making me gag.
“Icarus Fell,” he said with an ominous tone. “Take me to Heaven or face the consequences.”
My mind flashed back through all the consequences this man had doled out in my youth: locking me in the lightless closet, forcing me to stand in the sign of the cross for hours, the slender switch he used to punish me when I did something against God. Once he fashioned a crown of thorns out of a length of barbed wire he’d purchased for the purpose and made me wear it all day.
Enough of his fucking consequences.
“Kiss. My. Ass.”
The expression on his face took on a fleeting aspect of surprise, but rage quickly overcame it. Saliva spilled from the corner of his mouth and I watched it trace a path along the line of his jaw and down his chin. I shouldn’t have allowed myself the distraction.
The priest threw me across the room where I slammed into a pew, tipping it backward and banging my nose. Pain blinded me. I righted myself and tried to blink away the throb in my face as Father Dominic bore down on me. My faulty vision clouded his features into a smear of flesh punctuated by dark holes where his eyes should have been. He held something I couldn’t make out in his hand, something he brandished in the manner of a man meaning to strike.
I brought an arm up defensively, already knowing it wouldn’t be enough to protect me but unable to do anything else. He loomed over me, probably enjoying the moment, until arms wrapped around him—one around his neck, one around the top of his head. Even through the cotton filling my head, I recognized the sleeper hold from my years enjoying the entertainment provided by the likes of Hulk Hogan and his wrestling cronies.
At least it was a sleeper hold until the arms twisted Father Dominic’s head violently and snapped his neck with the dry pop of an old twig. The arms slipped away and the priest’s limp body slouched to the floor.
I blinked again and stared into the startled face of my mother.
“Do I deserve to go to Heaven now?”
She lowered her eyes to look at the crumpled body of the priest. Did she know he’d loved her in a way a man-of-the-cloth isn’t meant to love anyone? Did she know the things he’d done to me?
I scrambled to my feet and looked past her at Trevor leaning on the pew, watching with wide eyes. He shivered but looked otherwise unharmed. I breathed a relieved sigh and looked back at my mother still staring at the priest.
“It’s not your fault. None of it.” I reached out to touch her shoulder but she pulled away. “I can still take you.”
“I don’t want to go.”
She’d already made it clear, but hearing the words stung anyway. I’d finally met my mother and she didn’t want to be with me because she’d found someone else more important to her. Difficult to accept, even given the small amount of time we’d been together. I opened my mouth to protest, to beg, but she cut me off.
“You have to go now.”
She finally looked away from the body of Father Dominic but wouldn’t meet my eyes. Instead, she glanced around the church as if looking for someone hiding behind a pew or crouched behind the altar. I followed her gaze and saw no one, but the church had changed. A crack appeared in the wall, the pews showed signs of charring. While Christ’s shit-eating grin remained, his cross hung askew.
“But we--”
“Go,” she shouted and the ground shook beneath my feet.
Quite the special effect.
But it wasn’t. The church walls quaked, pews rattled across the floor. Bricks toppled onto the keyboard of the organ, hammering out a desperate, discordant tune. I pushed aside the throbbing in my face, pushed past my mother and grabbed Trevor’s arm, but I didn’t know where to go or how to get away. The whore-Mary in the stained glass window laughed at me, the joker-Jesus toppled to the floor. Without thinking, I pulled Trevor past the altar and headed for the rear entrance—it saved us once before, why not again?
As we passed through the tapestry, I glanced back. My mother stood over Father Dominic’s body watching us, making sure we got away.
And then the roof of the church collapsed.
The concussion of it hitting the floor pushed us into a hall no longer a hall. We stumbled and fell, skidding in red-orange dirt, scraping our palms. I quickly collected myself, got to my feet and pulled Trevor up.
I looked around at the circle of cages and saw Michael standing by Poe’s. Azrael and the boy stood twenty feet to his left. Two archangels and that damn kid, together in Hell.
This can’t be good.
Bruce Blake-All Who Wander Are Lost
Chapter Thirty-Five
Michael stepped away from Poe’s reach and her chest slammed painfully against the bars forcing a grunt from her. The tips of her fingers brushed the front of his red shirt and electricity crackled through the air.
“Now, now, Poe. Be calm.”
She bared her teeth, a small growl rumbling at the back of her throat.
“I saw what you did,” she said, tears threatening at the edge of her words. “I saw it.”
“You have gotten yourself in quite a pickle here, haven’t you?”
Poe stared at the archangel, seething as he spoke as if he hadn’t heard what she said. Michael looked past her over her shoulder.
“Hello, Piper.”
“Michael.”
Poe looked back at the woman. She sat on the straw rubbing her wrists where Poe had gripped them.
“You know each other?”
“Yeah, you might say that,” Piper responded as she stood and brushed straw off her backside.
Poe looked back to Michael.
“How...?”
“Piper followed a similar path to yours, didn’t you Piper?”
The woman grunted in response.
“Similar but different,” Michael continued. “The same but opposite.”
Poe considered asking him to clarify but didn’t. More pressing things needed clearing up.
“What are you doing here?”
“Oh, I am not here. An angel cannot be present in Hell.”
Poe’s breath caught in her throat.
If an angel can’t be in Hell, doesn’t that mean--
“Yes. Unfortunate, is it not? I really did like you, Poe. You were not the best guardian, but you followed orders with enthusiasm.”
“Told you,” Piper muttered.
Poe suppressed the urge to cross the cage and slap her. Instead, she remained pressed against the bars, ar
ms hanging loose between them.
“But I--,” she began before the archangel interrupted.
“Where is the boy?”
Poe paused a second, confused.
“What?”
“The boy, the son of Icarus. Where is he?”
“I...I don’t know.”
“She lost him again,” Piper said. She moved to the side of the cage but kept out of Poe’s reach.
“Again?”
“She’s made a habit of losing him down here.”
Poe glared at Piper; the woman smiled back.
“Truth hurt?”
One step of straw-littered cage floor passed beneath Poe’s feet before Michael’s angel-choir voice stopped her.
“Ladies, I do not have time for your quarrels. Do either of you know where the boy is?”
Poe looked back at the archangel, her stomach doing flips in her midsection. For years she revered this being, loved him in the way one loves an idol, but what she’d seen in Sister Mary-Therese’s apartment—a touch she didn’t see when it actually happened—brought an edge of nausea and suspicion.
“Why?”
Michael smiled. “The boy does not belong here. His time has not yet come.”
Some of Poe’s tension waned. Perhaps he’d come to take Trevor to safety. Still, the lingering memory of his touch on the birth-giving nun’s stomach clouded her thoughts. Could he be trusted?
“Why did you do it?”
Michael raised an eyebrow but said nothing.
“I know you can read my thoughts. Why did you do it? Why did you kill Sister Agnes?”
The archangel didn’t answer immediately and Poe clamped her jaw tight to keep nerves from chattering her teeth together. She wanted him to say she’d mis-seen the events in the apartment, tell her Azrael killed the nun to steal her soul for himself. She wanted Michael to return to the perfect picture she carried close to her heart: the tall, lambent doer-of-good who stood at God’s side representing everything moral and righteous.
Pleasepleaseplease.
She stared into his face, at his golden eyes and his hair draped over his shoulders. So many times she’d looked at him like this and been mesmerized, unable to speak, move or form independent thought. She felt some of that now but a feeling approaching disgust tempered it.