The Prison of the Angels (The Book of the Watchers 3)

by Janine Ashbless

  “So what do you think of me now, Milja?”

  Maybe I should have weighed my words before I spoke, but I had no idea what the right answer was—what he wanted or expected or needed from me. Sympathy? Forgiveness? Condemnation?—‘I see you were right from the start, Egan; you are a worthless piece of shit’? I was miles out of my depth. “It makes sense,” I said weakly.

  “Makes sense?”

  “Why you don’t have any trust in your own feelings. You know they’re just lying to you when it feels so right to love someone, to want someone. That’s what you think, don’t you?”

  He snorted down his nose, and I saw the ghost of a nod.

  And maybe he’s right. Maybe I’ve been wrong all along, following my heart.

  “So you see,” he said, his voice back to that scary calm. “I get that you’re kinky, Milja. It sort of showed. But it’s no biggie compared to what’s in my head. And if you think I wasn’t getting off on every evil thing you did to me last night, then you really, really weren’t paying attention.”

  My thoughts were a whirling maelstrom of tattered pages torn from our conversations. I snatched at one. “Your Father Giuseppe gave you absolution, didn’t he?”

  “Of course.”

  Oh Egan. I tried to grasp what his flat, closed gaze was telling me. “But you don’t believe him, do you?”

  He shivered.

  Too easy, was it? Divine Grace too freely given? You’re the one who won’t forgive yourself, Egan. I pulled the hand I held up to my lips and I kissed it; his palm, his knuckles, his fingertips. He let me, for a while, and then he made a fist and tried to withdraw, curling his bicep. I had the choice of letting him go or letting him pull me, so I held on and somehow ended up crawling over the table, crunching on the toast and scattering it to the floor, until I knelt over him and my unbound hair fell down around his face.

  Egan uncurled his fist. His eyes were wide and wondering. “That’s a terrible waste of toast,” he said.

  “We can always make more.” I stooped and kissed his mouth, putting my hands on his shoulders for balance, but he fell back against his chair like I was pushing him and I had to follow, my weight on his shoulders pinning him. There was heat billowing between us. A hot wet desperation.

  “You cannot fix me this way,” he warned.

  I bit his lips in rebuke. “I don’t want to fix you.” His mouth tasted of yellow fruit on a forbidden tree. “I’m not a therapist. I’m not God.” I slithered off the table, straddling his thighs, and reached down to grasp the thick, hard root of all his woes through his khakis. “I want to fuck you,” I breathed as I kissed him over and over again.

  “Ahh,” he said, eyes glazing over; “yes.” His hands slid up my bare legs under my robe, grasping my ass and circling my waist. “Oh, Milja…”

  I could feel what I wanted; so close, so strong, only fabric between my hand and his burgeoning length. That denial fed my fire. I pulled at his belt but it resisted my unpracticed fingers and I had to break from his sweet and hungry lips to look at what I was doing, embarrassed by my gracelessness but determined that nothing was going to stop me.

  He froze, quivering. “Hold on. Wait.”

  God damn me, but I answered, “No.”

  His cock surged under my hand and his groan was thick with lust, but when he got words out they were, “Milja. Stop.”

  You’re killing me, Egan! I looked up, but he wasn’t even focused on me. His gaze was on something over my shoulder, beyond the living room door. He stood up under me, setting my ass back on the table and detaching my hands, still staring.

  “Shite.”

  “Who is it?” I twisted my neck.

  “Look. Look at the TV!”

  Seriously? I wriggled around and followed as he stalked off into the living room without a backward glance. “What is it?”

  It was the BBC playing shaky cellphone footage that had come from somewhere in the American Midwest. Somewhere flat and grassy. A huge streak of twisting flame tore at unimaginable speed across the field of vision, obliterating a farmhouse, then vanished into the distance. “Reports from several points all over the globe,” the newsreader said, sounding urgent, and “possibly some unknown natural phenomenon.” Then “meteor storm” became “weapons misfire,” and “military alert.” The footage looped.

  Egan grabbed the remote and froze the digital picture. I saw a twisted helix of crimson plasma, a suggestion of serpentine scales or maybe flaming feathers. My blood ran cold.

  Azazel.

  In the background of the frame, fainter plumes of flame were falling from the dawn sky.

  ‘There fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp,’ I thought. ‘And the name of the star is called Wormwood.’

  “He’s kicked off,” Egan said incredulously. “It’s started. Armageddon.”

  15

  SIREN SONG

  It was on every digital news channel and carried by every current affairs broadcaster. We flicked from the British BBC through the Irish RTÉ News Now, to CNN and Fox and Sky and Al Jazeera, finding footage flashed up from around the world. It had started about an hour ago, it seemed. The flame was appearing randomly, scouring channels through the earth and disappearing as it smashed into hillsides. Even Russia Today had video of a fireball punching its way out of a mountain in what it claimed was Peru, spewing lava over the slopes below. None of the commentators seemed to have grasped that there was a single event; they talked about multiple random attacks taking place almost simultaneously, but I knew it was just one, flashing in and out of mundane space. Wherever it appeared the earth shook.

  I cringed as drone footage showed a fireball ripping through the suburbs of Mexico City and houses crumbling into the streets in its wake. That’s people dying, I thought sickly.

  “Spiteful son-of-a-bitch,” Egan breathed. “He’s trying to take us all down with him.”

  “No,” I said, my lips numb. “I understand him. It’s inat.”

  He looked at me balefully.

  “It’s a Serbian word. It means…” Actually, yes, it could mean spite, but it was way deeper and darker than that. “It means never giving in, no matter what. Your Winston Churchill understood it.”

  “Not my Churchill,” Egan rasped.

  “‘We shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender’. It means never bowing your head, even when you’ve lost. Defiance, no matter what the cost. My people understand that.”

  “It’s innocent human beings paying that cost!”

  “Then blame Michael,” I said, my voice trembling. “He has Raphael to back him up. He has the whole of the Heavenly Host at his command. If he called them in they could probably take Azazel down like that.” I snapped my fingers. “Michael’s insisting on doing it single-handedly. Now that’s pride.”

  He ran his hand through his hair and didn’t answer.

  “…unofficially reported to have been raised to DEFCON 2,” said a grim-faced announcer on CNN.

  “Oh, grand!”

  “We have to go back to Rome,” I blurted, the words out of my mouth before I’d even thought it through.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s one archangel left who hasn’t pitched in on either side,” I said in desperation.

  “You mean Gabriel.”

  “Yes. He could swing it. He could make the Pillar of the West stop. He could…” I didn’t know what he could do. Call off the Host? Fight alongside Azazel? “If he was freed… We have to talk to Gabriel.” I swallowed hard. “You’re going to have to break every last vow, Egan, and get us into his prison. We need to find out just how bad he wants to be free.”

  For a long moment he just looked at me, wide-eyed. Then he nodded. “Okay then. I don’t know how we’re going to get there, but we can try.”

  Oh you hero. “Where is he held?”

  “Right under the Forum. He was brought back to Rome with the other loot from Jerusalem, and th
e Emperor Domitian gave him into the care of the Vestals.” He was talking to himself as much as to me; his focus was already elsewhere. Bending to the sofa, he threw the whole piece of furniture over onto its cushions, exposing the edge of the rug underneath. Flipping that, he revealed the old floorboards.

  “Just perfect,” I said, shaking my head. I didn’t know if setting an angel to be tended by a group of professional virgins was genius or stupidity.

  Egan went to the sideboard, removed a knife from the drawer and then bent, without explanation, to prize at the end of one of those boards.

  I left him to it, walked into the kitchen, and opened the front of the washing machine to retrieve my clothes. It seemed petty, but I didn’t want to run around Rome in a borrowed bathrobe and no underwear. I pulled on each hot, wet garment in turn and then, with a grimace, expelled all the heat in them in a great puff of steam that left me dry and shaking and triumphant.

  But now my intent needed to be grimmer.

  Samyaza, I said inwardly.

  No, came the faint answer—not a verbal response at all, just a twisting sensation of rejection.

  You will do what I tell you. You started this. I will take everything I need of your power to do this.

  He roiled within me, and I seized him, twisting. I was in no mood to argue.

  When I walked back into the living room a little later, Egan was kneeling over a hole in the floorboards and unpacking a small bundle. I should have taken a moment to be impressed by his emergency preparations. He stuffed a wad of euros into his back pants pocket, checked through three passports for the one he wanted, and loaded a clip into a pistol.

  “We can get a car from the village to Knock Airport,” he said, his voice hard. “That’s closest. It’s small, mostly pilgrimage flights. Every damn inch of international airspace is going to be locked down within the hour, if it’s not already, but we can try hijacking a private plane. Hope to make it through the panic without being shot down.” Then he looked up at me and lurched back up onto both feet. “Shite. Your eyes.”

  They were glowing green again, I knew. I smiled thinly. I could feel Samyaza’s power like coppery venom throbbing in my veins.

  “We won’t need to fly.” If this works.

  “What are you—”

  “Trust me.”

  “Oh, Milja.” He half-shook his head, appalled. “You mean like, ‘Beam me down, Scotty’? You can do that?”

  “Samyaza will do what I tell him.” I wet my lips, searching for the words for what I knew instinctively. “When he gave himself up to the archangels, he surrendered his will. It’s like there’s no fight left in him. And I have him here.” I put my hand on my stomach, though it would have been more accurate to drop it a little lower.

  “In your possession,” said Egan, somewhat sourly. “It had better be that way around, Milja.”

  I nodded.

  “Are you sure about this?”

  No, I’m not. What other choice is there, though? “Yes.”

  “Okay then. Give me a minute to pack.”

  He vanished into the back of the house and I paced the floor restlessly as I waited.

  When he returned, he’d changed into heavier clothes all in black, including a vest with an excessive number of pockets. He carried a small black sports bag too, and was stuffing both with a number of oddments—a flashlight, a scarlet can of spray paint, a roll of toilet paper. Tucked under his arm was the lightweight fleece jacket he’d brought back from Norway. He fixed me with a searching look.

  “Where’s the mistletoe dart?”

  “I stabbed the Adversary with it,” I admitted, warily. “Last I saw, it was still stuck in him.”

  His eyes widened.

  “I didn’t actually kill him or anything…”

  Egan laughed. It wasn’t a big laugh, but it relaxed his face and returned a little warmth to his regard. “You never stop surprising me.”

  Is that good?

  “You should put the dressing gown back on, and fasten this over the top.” He tossed the jacket to me. “It’ll at least look a bit like you’re wearing a skirt. It’s not like I’ve got a spare dress lying around, and those leggings won’t do I’m afraid.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sure, we’ve got to drop in at the Vatican Museum before we go to the Forum.”

  “What for?”

  “The key. There’s only one, and it’s in Don Giuseppe’s office.”

  My heart sank a little. “I can’t take us into the Vatican—it’s holy ground. The Host would know the second we did something that brash.”

  “Some bits of it are holier than others. And let’s face it, the chance of us going unnoticed aren’t good anyway—there’ll be cameras and security all over. But if you want somewhere quiet that we both know… How about that small piazza behind our hostel? We can cross the river on foot.”

  I nodded unhappily. I didn’t want to cross back into Vatican territory, with or without a possessing demon onboard. I didn’t want to face Father Giuseppe again. Something about that bland little man scared me; something that had nothing to do with the physical danger he and Vidimus represented.

  But I followed Egan’s sartorial suggestion and did the jacket up as close as it would go. Which was pretty baggy. “Ready?” I asked.

  “I doubt it.”

  “Hold on tight to me.”

  Egan slipped his arms around my waist with more reluctance than he’d ever yet shown. A few minutes ago we’d been on the verge of frantic and uninhibited passion, I thought with a pang; now he had to force himself to embrace me. The difference was my unnatural green eyes, of course, and what they betrayed lurking behind them.

  I twined my arms around his neck and he shut his own eyes, pulling me closer with a sigh. A tiny, fugitive thrill echoed through my body.

  “Take a deep breath,” I warned. Then, Samyaza. We’re going. Now.

  The plunge into the airless nothingness between the folds of space was nothing short of vertiginous this time, as if I’d stepped off the lip of a coal-shaft. I knotted my hands around Egan, the only solid thing left to me, and felt the air drawn from my lungs in a long soundless shriek. I tried to hold a picture of the piazza in my head, but it shredded to tatters in the rush of the void and its colors were eaten by the darkness. Our fall went on and on, far longer than any before, and I could feel my chest burning with pain and my hands growing numb and Egan pulling from my weakening grasp. And I thought, We will die here.

  Then we landed and light burst around us. I wrenched out of Egan’s grasp and fell to my knees on the stones, heaving for air.

  I could hear the broken and incoherent words with which he tried to express quite how much he hated what had just happened. Then he grabbed my shoulders. “You okay?”

  I nodded, still gulping oxygen. We had arrived, it seemed, exactly where we’d been aiming for. The little piazza, barely more than a junction of three alleyways. It was daylight, and it was drizzling; a cool rain that seemed like a balm after the emptiness, and a joke in comparison to Achill’s scything, horizontal precipitation.

  My legs wobbled as he pulled me to my feet.

  “Please, let’s not do that again,” he said.

  “I’m not sure I could.”

  “It worked though.” He laughed sourly. “And if we survive any of this, at least I’ll be able to boast that I’ve literally been to Hell and back.”

  My stare must have been questioning.

  “C’mon, Milja,” he said, shouldering his bag. “Where did you think your short-cut was taking us?”

  Ohhh…

  Nobody seemed to have witnessed us, so we gathered ourselves and slipped out onto the main street. The road was jammed with cars, the sidewalks frantic with pedestrians. A choral anthem of car horns bellowed from all around us. Everyone who could move seemed to be in a hurry, and most of them were heading in the same direction. I pulled up the hood of Egan’s jacket to keep the rain out of my eyes. We let ourselves be swept int
o the flow toward the bridge and over the Tiber. The only stationary people we encountered were in a crowd gathered at the window of an electronic goods store, staring at the television screens in the window. We paused briefly to crane our necks around others’ shoulders. Several of the onlookers were locked in loud Italian debate about what they were seeing, others only stood and stared and crossed themselves.

  Hohhot in Inner Mongolia; Heidelberg in Germany; some city of fourteen million people in China that I’d never even heard of. The names scrolled across the bottom of the screen.

  I dreaded to think what the Americans would do if and when a big U.S. city appeared on that list, and they decided they were under attack.

  “Come on,” said Egan grimly, grabbing my hand. We pushed across the stationary traffic and onto the Ponte Vittorio Emanuelle II. The flow of pedestrians was that way too; toward Vatican City just over the water. Many were praying out loud. Everyone looked nervous. I glanced up and wondered at the strange look of the clouds overhead; they were clotted and writhing, like spoiled milk.

  “Where’d all the people come from?” I gasped, bumping along at his elbow.

  “Rome’s filling up with pilgrims for Advent; they come for the Papal Blessing. I’m guessing they’re heading for St. Peter’s Square right now. Happy birthday, by the way.”

  “What?”

  “You’re a December baby, aren’t you?”

  Today’s date hadn’t even occurred to me. “How do you know?”

  “I had a whole dossier on you to memorize when I was sent to Montenegro, remember.”

  My mouth flapped a bit. I did remember. Of course, the Catholic Church had been keeping tabs on my family for years. I remembered Father Giuseppe’s barbed comment about watching out for Nephilim children.

  “Birthdays weren’t a big thing in my family,” I said. “Our patron saint’s day is seen as much more important.”

  “Who’s yours?”

  The same one Vidimus looks up to: the Archangel Michael. Funny, that. “One who doesn’t like me.”