by Nana Malone
“Thanks,” Elisabeth said, closing her eyes so she could reassure herself HE was really back. She could feel him. So close that if she stepped back, she might nestle into his arms.
What would it be like, to be held by an angel? Her hand tingled at the memory of the time she’d touched him. Was he back to watch her? Or had he simply come to retrieve the gang member lying on her table? How she’d missed his constant, silent presence. As if … he cared.
Did he care?
“I told the Army I want to go active duty the moment I graduate boot camp,” Elisabeth said. “This time in nine weeks, I’ll be getting shot at by the Taliban.”
She sensed his silent form stiffen at her back. She could have sworn she heard a sharp exhalation of breath that did not belong to either of the other two people in the room. The news disturbed him. Good. For some reason, it mattered to her that it disturbed him.
Doctor Fa’azi nodded.
“Troubled part of the world,” he said. “I should know. I came here to get away from trouble there. Now you’re going there to find it. May Allah protect you.”
“Thanks,” Elisabeth said. “I have a feeling I’m going to be just fine.”
Feeling lighter than she had since the day Nancy had died, she scrubbed out as soon as they’d gotten the boy settled into the ICU and practically skipped down the hall, her gimpy leg hardly slowing her down at all.
* * * * *
Chapter 29
“Where ye are, death will find you,
Even if ye are in towers, built up strong and tall”
Quran 4:78
Earth - AD October 7, 2001
University of Chicago Medical Center – Chicago, IL
“I’m glad you’re back,” Abdullah tucked his tail up under his white doctor's coat as he finished scribbling notes onto the patient's medical chart. “Lucifer asked me to transfer onto the teaching staff here and train her.”
“She’s amazing,” Azrael said, not bothering to hide the shit-eating grin which lit up his face. “Isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is,” Abdullah said. “Since I gather you’re here to check in on our talented young nurse, and not to reap this chap, I’ll leave you while I finish my rounds.”
“Thanks, Abdullah.”
Azrael sat at the foot of the bed, watching the young man sleep. He supposed he should be upset the way Elisabeth had spoken about him, but she was right. He was the black man who took people she loved away from her.
He hadn’t come to take them. He came to see her. Her scent was like a drug, her voice a sweet, dulcimer song to his ears. The moment he’d left her presence, the yearning to be near her again made his body ache with an all-consuming hunger. Fifteen months away had been so miserable and painful, she could call him whatever names she liked and he would still worship the ground she walked upon. He was an addict, and she was his drug of choice…
She was deliberately putting herself in a war zone. Moloch’s agents were crawling all over that part of the world like fleas on a dog. But Azrael would protect her. He’d protect her even if it meant he had to vaporize half the Middle East…
He’d faded back enough so she could no longer sense him and observed her happiness as she’d finished her shift. In her mind, she’d defeated him. Seeing her happy made him happy. Her desire to defeat him was pushing her to develop her pre-ascended abilities. Emotion. The ability to wield her gift appeared to be tied to strong emotion. If she became strong enough, perhaps someday she might even survive his touch?
“How I yearn to touch you again,” Azrael whispered, reaching out to caress the single carnation Nurse Maria had put in a plastic cup so it would be the first thing the patient she’d written off as dead would see when he awoke. His hand tingled at the thought of it. The memory of how warm her small hand had felt as her fingers had closed trustingly around his. The feeling of deep-seated recognition which had passed into his heart, as though she were someone he had been looking for his entire life.
The carnation wilted and turned black.
“Not … yet,” Azrael said with regret. He plucked the dead flower out of the cup and finished the job, dissolving it the rest of the way so the kid didn’t wake up with a dead flower staring at him like an evil omen.
No evil omens today. She was headed to Afghanistan! Where he had just been assigned! They would be there together! It was irrational for him to be so happy about something so grim, but he was. Happy. A happy grim reaper. She’d beat him! She’d beat him and it made him happy.
His hand itched with sensation, a sensation he quelled these days by pulling out his notebook and drawing whatever image came into his mind. Nearly always her! The feel of void-reinforced pencil scratching against the page was reassuring. Almost as though he could feel the images taking life beneath his fingers.
The young man stirred, the heart monitor beeping a little faster as he rose towards consciousness. Slowly he opened his eyes. After a moment of adjustment, he realized Azrael was sitting in the chair next to his bed, sketching.
“Am I dreaming?” The young man glanced warily at the enormous glossy black wings carefully arranged over the back of the chair. A chair comprised of dead matter which Azrael only avoided dissolving into nothingness because he had finally mastered the art of keeping his emotions stable.
“No,” Azrael said, unsmiling as he glanced up from his sketch book to take in the unique slant of the young man’s cheekbone, including marks tattooed on his cheeks showing his gang affiliation, and continued sketching.
Silence. There was no sound except Azrael’s pencil scraping against paper. The Emperor had spared no expense inventing a means for Azrael to document his scientific observations, since no electronic device would work for him and pens dissolved the moment he began to put any feeling into his writing. Despite his efforts, a simple pencil with a bit of shielding remained Azrael’s most reliable means of collecting data.
“Are you here to take me to hell?” the young man finally asked. The heart monitor hiccupped, mirroring his agitation.
“Hmmm? Not right this moment,” Azrael said, not looking up. “Maybe in a little while.”
More silence. Azrael finished his sketch to go along with his notes from earlier today documenting every detail about how his favorite subject had defeated him. Nancy had been too badly broken to stay, but this young man had stood a fighting chance. It overjoyed him to see her win.
“You’re an angel,” the young man asked. “Right?”
“Not really.” Azrael snapped his sketch book shut and rose to his feet. “Not anymore. I sever souls from their mortal shells and bring them to either heaven, or hell. It depends upon how bad you’ve been during your lifetime.”
The young man tried to skitter back in his bed, but was tethered by a spider web of IV’s, wires and other medical paraphernalia.
“Who are you?”
“Who do you think I am?” Azrael asked, black eyes glittering above grim features.
“Death.”
“Ah-hah!” Azrael held out his hand so it was about a foot away from the young man’s hand. “Would you like to come with me now? Or would you like a second chance to straighten up your life?”
“There was a woman,” the young man said. “She was talking to me when I was in the emergency room. It was like I was floating above my body or something. She said I shouldn’t go with you.”
“It’s not my job to judge you,” Azrael said. “I just take you to one gateway, or the other. If you’ve done bad things, you can’t escape the truth of it. There are no illusions in the Dreamtime. ”
The young man cringed.
“Sounds like hell to me,” he whispered.
“Then maybe you should do what she told you,” Azrael shrugged. “Straighten things out so you don’t end up back up here. Next time … I’ll just take you.”
“I … I … I’ll straighten up,” the young man stuttered. “I … I … p-p-promise.”
“Good,” Azrael said. “Then I can g
o?”
“Um … Sir … Dude … Er … Angel …” the young man said. “Um … what did you write in the book about me.”
Azrael opened his book to the page he’d drawn Elisabeth ramming the defibrillator paddles down on the young man’s chest as his consciousness floated above his body, Azrael stood behind her, wings flared, reaching to take the young man until Elisabeth had ordered the him to stay.
“I didn’t imagine that then, huh?”
“No,” Azrael said. “You didn’t. She defeated me. You’re very lucky.”
Snapping the book shut, he disappeared in a flash of darkness. If Elisabeth saved spirits he wouldn’t have bothered saving, the least he could do was scare the crap out of them so they’d take advantage of the second chance she’d just given them.
It was the least he could do for her…
* * * * *
Chapter 30
And the recompense of evil is punishment like it,
But whoever forgives and amends,
He shall have his reward from Allah;
Surely He does not love the unjust.
Quran 42:40
Earth - AD December 17, 2001
Valley of Jehoshaphat
Azrael stormed into the processing chamber, determined to have it out with Lucifer once and for all. It hadn’t been squatters he’d reaped from Tora Bora valley, or even run-of-the-mill Taliban, but friends! Sata’an-human hybrid friends! Friends too badly injured to survive even if he had been able to get them out of the elaborate cave complex where they’d followed the Agent occupying Osama Bin Laden down the rabbit hole and been ambushed.
With thousands of Coalition forces bombing the hell out of the mountains and the place teeming with supposedly allied Afghani soldiers, how the hell had Bin Laden managed to slip his grasp? Not only had the squatter’s consciousness slipped the trap, but so had the genetically unique mortal shell known as Bin Laden!
“Why didn’t you authorize the Alliance to send in troops to help out?” Azrael practically screamed at Lucifer. “Do you have any idea how many men we just lost?”
He didn’t look bright or beautiful now, the debauch Fallen son of the Eternal Emperor. The stench of alcohol was overpowering. Lucifer sat slumped on his so-called ‘throne,’ Italian designer clothing smeared with dirt, wings crumbled carelessly beneath him as though he didn’t care if he crushed or broke his feathers.
All around them, video screens displayed the live streaming footage of dozens of Sata’an-human hybrid operatives embedded with Coalition, Afghan Allied, and even civilian village groups as they frantically searched the area for the escaped Agent they’d been trying to pin down. Easy? Tora Bora was supposed to have been a cinch!
Lucifer lifted his head from its weary slump, his eyes unfocused as he shakily lifted a glass of scotch to his lips and took a long, silent dreg.
“If I invite one emperor in,” Lucifer said, a sneer coming to his lips at the mere mention of his father’s name, “I have to invite the other. And then we’ve got a whole different set of problems to deal with.”
“Then let Shay’tan send in his observers, too!” Azrael shoved the consciousness of the Taliban he’d reaped in anger into Lucifer’s face. The molecules in the room shuddered as emotion added force behind Azrael’s words, but he was in good enough control of his anger to keep a lid on it. It wasn’t really Lucifer that Azrael was mad at but … life!
This clusterfuck had just prolonged the war Elisabeth had thrown herself into!
“Those two idiots will grind this planet into dust,” Lucifer slurred, swirling the amber liquid around and around his glass so that the ice cubes made a slight tinkling noise. “Or have you forgotten how you ended up here in the first place?”
The molecules in the room trembled in harmonic resonance to the discordant note Azrael broadcast below the threshold of human hearing. The Taliban squeaked in terror and began to plead in Pashto for his life or … not life. He was already dead, zapped out of his mortal shell when the bastard had leaped out of the shadows and finished off Ben Franklin, a Sata’an-human hybrid Azrael had done countless missions with over the years. Azrael usually didn’t reap non-squatter patsies and drag them to Gehenna, but this one had especially pissed him off, shooting the dying man while Azrael had been off dissolving matter for a rescue team to get inside without collapsing the cave.
In the end, it hadn’t made any difference. Buried deep in Bin Laden’s elaborate fortress of hidden caves, Azrael hadn’t been able to summons help in time to save Ben Franklin’s life. The pathway out had been blocked by falling rubble caused by a Coalition bomb. He couldn’t teleport Ben out beyond the blockage because touching him meant instant death. He hadn’t been able to teleport a medic in for the exact same reason. Azrael had stood by, helpless, as his friend’s life blood had poured out of his bullet-ridden brain while his consciousness pleaded not to take him because he had a pregnant wife and children.
The sound of Ben Franklin’s human widow keening as someone broke the news of her husband’s death echoed through the underground network of caves. Sarah Franklin was legally blind, with a terrible scar that ran across her face from a car accident that had left her disfigured. She hadn’t cared that her husband with the strong Sata’an-lizard features had been different from other males, or that the home he’d made for her was really the gateway to Hell. All she knew was that Ben had worshipped the ground she’d walked upon and left her with six young children to raise without a father, a seventh on the way.
“Sir?” one of the Sata’an-hybrid guards inquired, his voice warbling with emotion at the news of the death of yet another friend. “What should I do with … um … sir? He’s not a squatter.”
Lucifer looked up, the drunken fog clearing for a moment as he regarded the frantic, squirming consciousness wriggling from Azrael’s grasp. His eyes locked with Azrael’s, not the guards, as he gave his orders.
“It’s up to him to decide what he wants to do with him,” Lucifer said, his words measured. “He says he walks the middle pathway between the Commandments of my father and the Sharia law of the old dragon. Let him interpret what the law says in this situation.”
Somewhere behind him, the wailing of Sarah Franklin grew to a screeching crescendo as she broke the news to her eldest son and daughter, both old enough to begin training as Lucifer’s operatives. Azrael felt as though he were responsible for their pain.
If only he’d been more aggressive about dissolving the collapsed entrance to the cave so help could have gotten to Ben sooner instead of timidly dissipating one rock at a time so he didn’t bring the mountain down upon his head! If only he’d watched Ben’s back when the airstrike had caused an avalanche instead of flitting cavern-to-cavern like a wraith, trying to cut his way through the electromagnetic jamming device Bin Laden had deployed to make it difficult to sense the squatter’s exact location. If only he’d done a better job of searching the place Ben had been injured from falling debris before leaving to summons help.
If only he hadn’t left Ben alone, barely conscious and bleeding, an easy victim to be shot execution-style by the Taliban while he’d cleared a pathway for help!!!
“Go to hell!” Azrael hissed, aware of what Lucifer was trying to pull. He was making Azrael solely responsible for breaking protocol, putting the decision back on him as to whether this consciousness got consumed by the ‘guests’ occupying the lower levels of Gehenna or transported to the Dreamtime to face the truth of his poor life-choices.
“Be my guest,” Lucifer said. His gaze became frightfully clear as he willed away the alcoholic stupor he’d been trying his hardest to sink into and the cold, hard politician who’d once led the Galactic Alliance and kept Shay'tan at bay made a rare appearance. Without breaking Azrael’s gaze, he reached into his shirt and pulled out the key, slipping it into the failsafe device that opened the enormous blast doors that led into the fiery hell-dimension. Heat blazed into the room, giving Lucifer’s snowy white wings an eerie, fiery glow
.
“It’s your free will…”
“Get the doctor,” someone shouted behind him. “Her water just broke. She’s fainted.”
Sarah Franklin wasn't doing so well…
With a scowl, Azrael dragged Ben Franklin's murderer down through the descending levels of gateways until he got to the precipice overlooking the deepest level of Gehenna, the pit where he’d met his death. Far below, so far down it wasn’t possible to see them, he could hear the squabbling Agents vying for position.
Every now and again, when Moloch-worshippers didn’t open microportals and feed him enough sacrifices of humans or animals, Moloch and the bigger gods fed upon whichever lesser god pissed them off. Azrael could hear the chatter grow louder as the inmates recognized the sound of the gates opening above like monkeys in a cage. It was feeding time. He hung the Taliban who had murdered his friend over the precipice and prepared to let go.
‘You’re Hashem’s policeman,’ the General had said. ‘Not his executioner.’
The song which perpetually played in the background of Azrael’s mind grew stronger, reinforcing his memory of the advice his mistress wished for him to follow.
“Bah!” Azrael screeched at the terrified consciousness.
He tightened his grip around the man’s throat and stormed back up through the passageways, dragging the accursed consciousness behind him past the seven blast doors, back into the processing chamber where Lucifer gave him a bemused stare. It wasn’t usual for the even-tempered Angelic to go off the deep end like this, but ever since his cluelessness about his own feelings had nearly cost him the woman he loved, a whole bunch of emotions kept demanding to be noticed.
“It’s not so easy being the Emperor of Earth?” Lucifer said softly, a mixture of ‘I told you so’ and compassion radiating out of his eerie silver eyes. “Is it?”