They ceased to talk then, the only sound that of their mingled breathing. The musky scent of Mephistopheles’s feathers, heavier than any odor Shamayim’s wind could possibly lift, sank over them like veils. Like incense, Stephen thought, and bergamot.
Then they heard the sound of wings.
“They’ve seen us,” Asrial whispered.
“They could just be flying by.”
“No, they’ve seen us!”
“Lady...”
“Mephistopheles, pull back!”
The black wing retracted abruptly as the demon lost his grip. The sound of wings beating the light air of Heaven drowned out his small curse as he sagged down the cliff-side, the head of a spear planted beneath one shoulder-blade.
“No!” Asrial leaped upward, jerking the two humans with her. Her own wings flared outward like a sunburst. “STOP!”
The two guards stared at her, one of them with a foot on Mephistopheles’s back.
“Who are you?” one of them asked.
“I’m Asrial of the Ninth! Let him go! He is on a mission to speak with the Eighth Choir, and I am his escort!”
The two guards stared at Asrial, and Stephen held his breath. He’d never seen a male angel still in Grace, and they were... they were overwhelming, as if the sun could shine partially through them, suffusing their shapes with a radiance he could barely look at without his eyes watering. And these were merely angels? Those poor shepherds. And Mary at the annunciation! To bear the presence of an archangel! Stephen shuddered and turned his face into his arm.
The first guard grabbed Asrial by the arm. “An escort, eh? Born of the Ninth? Where’s your halo, angel?”
“I could not take it to Hell!” Asrial exclaimed, trembling in his grip. “Do you think me mad?”
The guard pulled back, eyes narrowing. He looked at Stephen and Brad. “And these wingless things?”
“Human souls. Sent by the Great Betrayer to help the demon plead his case.”
Mephistopheles looked up at her dizzily, hanging on. He had just enough presence of mind to keep his body arched from the rock to avoid crushing the token and the bird.
“I’m not sure about this,” the one above Mephistopheles said. “The Archangel said nothing about sending another messenger to the Great Betrayer.”
“Do you think yourself privy to all the Archangel’s plans?” Asrial demanded, earning the stares of all three of her companions. Sickened from her lack of halo and giddy on Heaven’s light air, she found within herself an unexpected courage. “I demand to see him at once!”
They studied her and the two humans, the demon. “You’ll see him soon enough. When he’s done with his council. Then we’ll see if you really are who you say.” The second guard braced himself against Mephistopheles’s back and pried the spear out of his body, releasing a gout of black blood.
Asrial thrust the two humans’ hands at the guards. “Take these two. Since you have so summarily injured the Great Betrayer’s liaison, I will help him to fly. Obviously I cannot trust you to restrain yourselves.”
The two guards frowned at one another, then shrugged and plucked the two humans off the mountainside. One of the angels grunted.
“These souls are heavy.”
“They’re human,” Asrial said tartly, lighting beside Mephistopheles. “You did not honestly expect them to be without weight as we are, did you?”
The angels said nothing and levered themselves aloft, taking priest and boy with them. Asrial examined the wound. “Mephistopheles,” she whispered.
“I can’t help you,” he said, voice taut. “That wing is useless.”
“It’s still bleeding….”
“We can bind it when we stop. You dare not talk to me long, Lady, or they will suspect… but oh, Lady! You fooled even me.”
Asrial folded her arms around his waist and pulled. “Come with me, Mephistopheles! There is so much to do yet….”
He beat his one wing, the other hanging uselessly at his side, and together they labored into the air beneath the curious stares of the other angels. Asrial nodded to them and flew alongside as they led… over the mount where the bell tower stood in grim vigil, down into the valleys of Shamayim, down to the war camps that had spread like a black canker over the flank of Heaven.
“It’s gotten worse,” Asrial said, staring at the glowing lights studded across the black net of the ground. The stench of boiled leather and acrid metal rose on the wind as they flew closer.
Mephistopheles said nothing, but he counted the number of camps as they circled above the first two guards.
The ground rushed to meet them and they smashed through a layer of miasmic odor so strong Asrial tripped on her landing. She and Mephistopheles stumbled several feet forward before she stopped herself.
The guards stood silently, watching as she rose to her feet. The tent beside which they stood was familiar, and she wondered briefly, wildly if she’d been discovered.
“Wait here,” the first guard said. “We’ll bring you to the Archangel when he’s done.”
“Thank you,” Asrial said haughtily and waited until they left. “Inside,” she said, pulling open the flap. She glanced at her surroundings; several more tents had been added since she’d last stayed in this one beneath the shadow of the halo mount. It no longer sat on the camp’s perimeter, but it was close enough.
Once the others were inside, she took a small breath of the tainted air and ducked after them, wings tightly bundled to her back.
Stephen was helping Mephistopheles untie the back panel of the vest. The demon sat on a bench in the dark, cradling the grackle.
“Somehow I expected Heaven to be different,” the priest said through clenched teeth.
“Friendlier,” Brad said.
“Heaven prepares for war,” Asrial said, pacing forward on light feet to crouch in front of Mephistopheles. “Did you expect otherwise?”
“Somehow, yes,” Stephen said, scraping the last of the torn fibers from the matted blood around the spear wound. It detached from the demon’s back with a soft sucking sound.
Asrial laid a soft hand on Mephistopheles’s broad wrist as the demon flinched. His left wing draped like a boneless piece of cloth across the ground. He did not look at her, but the bird in his hand regarded her with an eye touched by a single white highlight.
The angel lifted her head. “You must all run. As soon as the wound is bound, run for the nearest place you can use the token and go. Michael will know instantly who I am and that I lied. None of you will survive his wrath.”
“Man’s Enemy offered us brandy and warm beds, and the Champion of God will kill us on sight, is that it?” Stephen asked, unlacing the back of the demon’s blouse.
“I am sorry!” Asrial cried. “I wish it were otherwise, Stephen. I wish we had not been found. Leave me here and I will find Gabriel for you. I will make him listen.”
“We can’t leave you here,” Brad said. “They don’t exactly like you much, remember?”
“They will like you even less,” Asrial answered. Her wings fluttered against her back. “This is not how I’d hoped it would be. But I did not expect Shamayim to be so well guarded!”
“More fool you,” Mephistopheles rasped.
She looked up at him, wide-eyed, and found his expression weary but not ungentle. He touched her jaw, as Lucifer had, with the arm that he could still feel.
“I am sorry,” Asrial said again. “Please, leave me here. There is more hope that way.”
“How will you get back?” Stephen asked. He’d exposed the hole in the demon’s back and was ripping the vest panel into strips thin enough to loop around Mephistopheles’s chest.
“If Michael could throw me down to Earth, I am certain Gabriel could send me down as well,” Asrial said, unable to look away from the demon’s face. “Barring that, it should be simple to anger Michael enough to earn myself another blow.”
“I will kill him if he lays a hand on you again,” Mephistopheles said. He
opened his eyes to look down at the angel crouching before him.
Stephen snorted. “You’ll have to wait in line.”
Asrial glanced at the priest, then touched the demon lightly on the knee. “There are more important things now than whether or not God’s Champion swats a member of the Ninth. We must stop them. We must stop all of this.”
“They don’t seem to be guarding us,” Brad reported. He was sitting next to the tent flap, peeking out. “But there are a lot of them everywhere. All armed.”
“I can distract them,” Asrial said.
Brad glanced at her dubiously as Stephen grunted, pulling the makeshift bandage tight. “Can you move for me, Mephistopheles?”
The demon straightened by inches, blouse hanging loose over his hairless chest. “That’ll do,” he said in a rough voice. He pulled the token out of the other vest panel before shoving the rest of them at Stephen. “Use these to make a splint for the arm and wing. They’ll get in my way otherwise.”
“Arm?” Stephen asked, alarmed.
“I’m losing feeling in it.” The demon grinned without humor. “They’re my kind, Father. They know exactly where to plant their spears… and I obliged them by holding still.”
The priest grimaced and fashioned a make-shift splint. The arm was easier than the wing, but he labored in silence until he rigged the torn fabric harness, imprisoning the arm to the front of the demon’s body and the wing to the back. The blouse fell in soft folds everywhere until it bunched beneath the taut straps; its black stain clung, sticky, to the demon’s skin. “How’s that?”
“Better,” Mephistopheles said. “We should leave soon.” He handed the token to Stephen, then looked down at Asrial. He reached out to touch her hair and stopped. Shaking himself, he slid his palm beneath the grackle and offered it to her. “Keep him with you.”
“The bird?” Asrial’s eyes widened, but she obediently held open her hands.
“You shouldn’t have to stay here alone,” Mephistopheles said.
Asrial looked down at the bird, then nodded once. “Get ready to go,” she said. “When you hear my voice, sneak out the back of the tent, make for the open ground.”
Brad stood, joining Stephen. Both humans helped the demon to his feet. Asrial looked once at them, then offered the grackle her shoulder. It hopped onto the muscle strand that led to the top of her wing arm.
She ducked out of the tent, cleared her voice, and called out, “Where is Michael? I want my halo back immediately!”
A few angels passing by frowned at her. She grabbed one of them by the arm. “You! Where is the Archangel? He stripped me of my halo beyond God’s will, and I demand its return!”
The guard that had planted the spear in Mephistopheles’ back jogged to her. “What are you doing?”
“I want to talk to Michael now. I will not wait any longer!”
“You’ll go straight back into that tent until the Archangel deigns to see you, girl, or I will march you back into it myself!”
Asrial’s wings spread, feathers scything open and cupping the darkness of Heaven’s lambent night. “You would not dare.”
“I would!” the guard said, just as the perimeter sentry cried out.
“They’re getting away!”
Her guard glanced that way, then tackled her. The grackle squawked and sprang from her shoulder and Asrial went down, clawing him with her blunt nails. He wrenched her arms to the earth and pinned her down with his body.
“Get them! Stop them!” he yelled, then glared at her with blazing eyes. “Your friends might evade us, traitor… but you are for the Archangel. He will not take your little fiction half as well when he realizes what you’ve done.”
“I answer only to God,” Asrial replied, panting.
He spit on her face.
They dragged her before Michael and threw her down at his feet, her hair in ragged knots around her face and her chiton torn and stained. She could not even curl her wings around herself for a shield; the giddiness had not left her and if anything had intensified, as if her halo alone had grounded her against the omnipresence and power of God’s emanations.
But she could feel his eyes on her. She did not know the fate of the others; the bird had gotten away, for which she’d been grateful. If only she had been so lucky.
“You again.”
The words were so hard she could have bruised herself against them.
“I thought I told you where to go.”
“We found her on the slope, sir. With two humans… and a demon.”
“What!” His hand seized her chin and jerked her head up so suddenly she gasped. So bright did his blue eyes burn that tears of pain sprang from her own. “You brought them here? To attack me? You betrayed us!”
“No!” Asrial said.
His hand knocked her cheek so hard she slammed into the ground and slid a few feet across the marble. “Silence! For such offenses we have no punishment dire enough! You are a God-forgotten Fallen demoness! Worse than any human!”
Asrial was gasping for a breath when his foot connected with her ribs and flipped her onto her back, bending her wing at an awkward angle. The same blow crushed the breath she’d been seeking out of her lung.
“I should have killed you in the beginning!”
Asrial looked up at him, fighting to breathe. He towered endlessly, golden and white and implacable. Her body strewn at his feet felt suddenly like an offering she could no longer retract, and she closed her eyes, taking the words as blows on her unprotected soul.
“But your crimes are so heinous I am forced to make an example of you. Guard! Take her to Raphael. Just before the dawn we’ll hang her on a human crucifix.
“And then,” and Michael stared down at her, “We’ll let her die there.”
Asrial did not resist when the hands gripped her shoulders and pulled her back up. She could barely help them. The room smeared into a kaleidoscope of light and stars and scents until she was manhandled onto a bench in another room, this one smaller and redolent with the perfumes of myrrh, vervain, and rosemary.
The light on her eyelids was faint, so Asrial opened them. The waves of a heavy blanket obscured part of her vision, but beyond them was a small room, holding only a desk and a stool and a cabinet… and an archangel, his back to her, grinding some aromatic poultice with a mortar and pestle. Her entire body contracted in fear and she gulped for breath—which struck a lance of pain up her chest. She cried out.
The archangel turned, then reached out. “Oh, no! Don’t move. Sssh.”
Asrial ceased her struggles and concentrated on breathing shallow draughts.
“Good.” He sat on the stool, facing her, the mortar on his thighs. She found it strange to see the evidence of tears on an impassive face. “Ah, girl. You should not have come back. Michael is in such a state I fear he will not spare you for all the love in Heaven.”
She looked up at him. “Who… who are you?”
“Raphael. I heal. Or I did.” Raphael closed his eyes, then shook his head and resumed crushing the herbs. “I was there when he cast you down. Why did you come back? Oh, does it matter! You should not have!”
“I had to,” she said, swallowing. “The others. Where are the others?”
“The two humans and the demon?”
Asrial nodded.
“No one knows. I suspect they’re gone to wherever they came from.”
She almost whimpered, so strong was her relief.
“But they left you behind,” Raphael said sadly. “Such is the way of the Fallen, dear one. You should never have thrown your lot in with them.”
“The Archangel gave me no choice,” Asrial roused herself to say.
“I suppose not. But still.”
“Where… is… Gabriel?”
Raphael paused, hands shaking. “Gabriel? Still in the nursery, I suspect. He’s been there ever since… well. He’s been there a while.”
“I need to talk to him. Now.”
“I fear you have l
ittle coin with which to make demands.”
Asrial bit back tears of frustration and pain. “I am dying already,” she said. “You cannot hurt me anymore. Bring me to Gabriel.”
Raphael’s brows furrowed even deeper. “Michael bruised your cheek a bit, and cracked one of your ribs, but you’re hardly—”
“I am dying!” Asrial said and panted against the pain the cry had exacted as price. “Bring me to Gabriel!”
“Just calm yourself,” Raphael said, patting her shoulder. “It will do you no good to become overwrought. I’d heal you, you know, if I didn’t know… well, why bother? It’ll be over tomorrow. I’m not really a healer anyway.”
Asrial struggled to hold on, but the utter impenetrability of the archangel proved at last too great for her. She slid, fighting bitterly all the way, into unconsciousness.
Circling on the light winds of Shamayim, the grackle stared with hard yellow eyes at the small building in the center of the largest camp. A swift reconnaissance of the surrounding area had revealed no sign of the black-winged one, so it had followed the sweet-smelling one when she’d been taken there by the others. She had not returned.
The air cut beneath its wings easily enough for flight. It veered away and went searching.
Chapter Ten
The asphalt of the Jesuit parking lot had never felt harder. Stephen rolled onto his side after he caught his breath and stared up at the starlight. He closed his eyes and panted, his breath white and cold in the dark.
“Oh, man,” Brad said, “I feel broken.”
Broken. Stephen bolted upright. “Mephistopheles?”
There was no answer.
Stephen jumped to his feet and ran to the lump of black and gray just outside the cone of light cast by the street lamp. “Mephistopheles!” He dropped to his knees beside the demon and touched his back. The blouse was wet and hot. “God Almighty!”
Brad crawled over to him. “Is he awake?”
“No… and he’s bleeding, worse than before. Dammit, Brad, he needs a doctor! I can’t keep him from dying. I don’t even know how to fix people much less angels….”
A Rosary of Stones and Thorns Page 10