The Prison of the Angels

by Janine Ashbless

  I folded my arms. “I bet that makes you way popular.”

  His mouth tightened and he looked down.

  “What happened, Satan?” I asked. There was no need to raise my voice in that quiet place. “When did you become the Enemy of God?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t,” he whispered. “It’s all lies.”

  “Forty days and forty nights in the wilderness?” I asked, skeptically. “‘Bow down and worship me,’ you said, ‘and I will lay all the kingdoms of the world at your feet’?”

  His reply was so soft I barely caught it. “I was doing my job.”

  “Right. It’s a bit unfair how everyone else seems to have gotten completely the wrong idea, then. The Host. The Church.”

  “Funny how you comprehend that, and my brothers do not.” He pushed himself away from the beam. “Is that all, Milja?” he said bitterly, stalking toward me. “Can I go now?”

  I’d almost forgotten how physically dominating he could be when he took the initiative. It took all I had in me not to take a step back as I looked up into his face.

  “You screwed up,” I reminded him, pushing back at my own weakness as much as I was pushing back at him. “Your gamble failed. There are two Watchers free now.”

  It worked. He blinked—angels hardly ever blink—and turned away from me. Hiding his face. “Are you done?”

  “You were the one who followed me into the church.”

  “No I didn’t.” He looked over his shoulder at me. “Not everything’s about you, Milja.”

  “So you just have a thing for Saint Teresa?” I snapped.

  “There,” he said with hauteur, “was a woman who knew the true consolations of spiritual obedience.”

  And he vanished.

  Oh Uriel. I shook my head, slightly stunned. You just can’t see what’s in right front of you, can you? Yet it sticks out like, well…

  I clomped down two floors from the attic to my own room, seething. And not just with irritation at his disdain, or anger that he’d played me for a fool. There was a problem with angels, I’d found; they’re just too good-looking. Even the creepy ones. Even the ones that are trying to get you trapped or killed. They exhale charisma like carbon dioxide, and I’ll shamefully admit that it leads, inevitably, to some serious global warming. I locked my door and kicked off my wet shoes and that stupid long skirt that had been supposed to make me acceptable to the clergy. I stared at myself in the gilt-framed mirror over the bed; my eyes shiny and wild, my mouth hard and full and downturned. My pale legs stuck out from beneath the baggy sweater I’d chosen so unwillingly. I felt wildly off-kilter. Things were churning inside my soul, clawing for release, desperate for attention I would not give them. And my body—Oh my body; how it ached. My belly felt ravenously empty, but it wasn’t food I wanted.

  I wondered if Egan was back in his own room yet, a floor below mine and a corridor along. I pictured kicking his door open and marching in, dressed just like this. I imagined straddling his lap and pulling his head back by his hair so that I could bite his lips—and that thought made my insides spasm with delicious pain. I pictured Egan, provoked beyond human endurance, kissing my breasts and grabbing my ass and sliding his fingers beneath my damp panties and touching me there. And I groaned out loud.

  Saint Teresa knew what it was all about, I told myself; ‘Lord, either let me suffer or let me die.’ That pain better than any calm. That emptiness inside that needed to be filled. That grinding ache for a revelation that would overwhelm the senses and obliterate the self.

  I dragged my sweater over my head and threw it across the room. Come upstairs, Egan. Can you hear me? Come upstairs and throw me down on the bed like you did in Minot and give me what I need. Fill me. Take any hole you want. Make me scream. Make me beg. Make me forget the fear and the rage and the loss.

  Make me forget Azazel.

  Make me stop thinking about what he did, and to whom. Make me stop wanting what I can’t have. Make my pussy stop seeping heat and my mouth stop burning for his kisses and my heart stop hurting.

  I pulled off my panties. In secret rebellion, I’d worn beneath my dowdy skirt the brightest, most lacy pair I owned: a cerise froth. I’d titillated myself with imagining how Egan would have reacted, if only he’d known. I’d pictured his arousal and his frustration and his shamefaced torment. If ever there was a priest with no natural calling to celibacy, it was Egan. His body was painfully, dangerously sexual in instinct and appetite.

  What a waste. Panties and man, both.

  I cannot bear this.

  I walked barefoot to the window and flung open the glass doors. The winter rain was pounding vertically down, flooding the little balcony and bouncing up in splashes as high as my thighs. Lightning stutters outlined the dome of St. Peter’s. I stepped out onto the ledge, defying the rain, ignoring the traffic queued in the streetlights below me, not caring if anyone looked up and saw my bare muff, my inadequate camisole top, my hard and tingling nipples poking through the wet cotton. I lifted my face to the ferocious deluge.

  “Azazel!” I called, my voice guttural.

  He heard me, and he came; a cloud of darkness boiling across the rooftops, across the river and the road. I staggered back into my chamber as it flooded over the balcony’s iron railing. He coalesced into human form as he touched the marble floor, a demon-god of shadows and smoke and burning intent. He swept me backward, right off my feet, and knocked the breath from my lungs against the wall. The loud tick of the clock suddenly fell quiet.

  He pulled my thighs apart.

  “Azazel,” I gasped in relief and joy and terror.

  He put his hand over my mouth, smothering my words. His eyes were black and fathomless pits and his erection was rock-hard. As I struggled under his palm, the thrash of my open legs only made it easier for his cock to find and breech its hot, wet target.

  OH—!

  I bit him, and he gave me air at last, but by then I had no words. He’d driven them all out of me with that first ruthless thrust. For a moment we both went still. I was pinned to the wall by the press of his hard, hard body and the heft of his hands, stretching me open. His fingers bit into my ass cheeks and I sank my nails into his back in retaliation.

  Please, I thought, but when he moved inside me I only cried out wordlessly.

  Please, yes, yes.

  It was a good thing I was so wet, so aroused, because he wasn’t giving any thought to foreplay. The sheer strength and girth of him hurt me, but in all honesty I wanted to be hurt. There was not enough hurt to make up for my guilt and my emptiness, and now, the more he thrust the less it hurt; not his length or his thickness, not even the bite of his hands in my heavy flesh. Need gobbled up pain. Wet gobbled up hard. In Me gobbled up In You.

  The only thing that still hurt was the emptiness of his eyes, staring into mine. His face was set in grim lines. No joy there, and none of the wicked playfulness I knew so well. Just inexorable need. Like I was a black hole and he was being pulled into a gravity well he could not escape. Like I was crushing him even as he crushed me against that wall, harder and faster and deeper. My breasts shuddered wildly beneath my wet clothes as his rhythm built to a pounding beyond endurance.

  Please, Azazel, please keep—

  Oh God. Oh God. I’m going to—

  He shut his eyes.

  I came, and as I came he filled me. Wordlessly and absolutely silent, for the first time ever. The only sound was my own high cries, and the thump of my head against the plaster. He let his own head fall into the crook of my shoulder, and held me there. I could feel the hot wet gusts of his breath on my neck. I could feel the race of his heart, banging against his ribs and mine.

  He lifted his face and I looked into his eyes, and in that moment, before he could make any decision, I reached out and kissed him softly on the lips. Pleading.

  Oh, Azazel, please just talk to me please just kiss me—

  I think I nearly killed him with that kiss.

  He turned his fa
ce away and let go of me. I slithered down the wall, my legs folding, trapped between the whitewash and his hard torso. His erection was a thick strong curve, just nodding in submission; I caught it in my mouth, tasting myself and him, and laved him with my tongue.

  Azazel groaned out loud—the first sound he’d made since entering the room.

  I drew him deep into my throat.

  He clenched his fist and slammed it against the wall, the groan turning into a roar—and as he roared he started to come again, filling my throat, pulse after pulse. He didn’t stop. He kept punching the wall, and kept ejaculating, and kept on howling like I was sucking his soul out. Chunks of plaster were raining on my head, and I couldn’t breathe, and I was choking, but his other hand was knotted in my hair now, forcing me close, and that was all that mattered to me.

  Only when the room started fading into blackness did he let me go, and even when he pulled free he still slopped over my lips and chin and down the curves of my heaving cleavage. He staggered back a few paces.

  His eyes weren’t empty now. He looked confused, and in pain. But that was something. Something.

  “Please don’t go,” I gasped, falling forward on hands and knees.

  He rolled his head, a half-gesture of denial. And he kept backing off toward the window.

  He was starting to turn away now.

  I played the only card I had left to keep him from going. “I’ve found Samyaza.”

  He stopped, and looked back at me. It seemed to take a long time for him to stop simply feeling, and start thinking. “So? We’ve already found him,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Penemuel has worked out the location of every one of our brothers. She’s smart like that.”

  “I can help you free him! He’s right here in Rome!”

  He tilted his head, eyes narrowing. “No, he’s not. We know precisely which mountain in Jotunheim.”

  Mountain? Jotunheim? Rome was supposedly built on seven hills, but I didn’t understand what he was talking about. “I’ve seen him!” I said, still panting.

  Azazel sifted his hand through his thick black hair, which made my heart thump painfully. Oh, at least he was still here, still talking. “What did he look like?”

  “Um.” I sat back on my heels, fingering angelic semen from my bruised and swollen lips. “A big, big lion thing. With a human head. Wings.”

  He smiled. It was a puzzled smile, but it was devastating as far as I was concerned. “That isn’t Samyaza,” he said. “That’s Gabriel.” He turned back toward the window, and darkness swirled around him as he stepped up into the night. “I’d wondered what happened to him.”

  Then he was gone.

  The clock resumed its heavy tick, and another lump of plaster fell from the ruined wall.

  6

  TROLL TONGUE

  I am in the place of dust again. The place of forgotten things. The sand shifts under my feet, revealing half-buried secrets. I find a bone carving, warm and worn, of a woman with the head of a snake. I find a stone block crudely carved with a horned man with a pointed chin, tied by long ropes. I find an old photograph of my family; me just a babe in arms, my Papa still clean-shaven, my…

  I throw it away.

  The sphinx is motionless, his eyes closed, coated in dirt. The tip of one wing sticks out of the dunes, the bedraggled feather as long as my body and as red as an old blood-stain. I stand before his paws and wonder if that is a pharaoh’s headdress he’s wearing or just a huge mass of unkempt hair.

  “Gabriel?”

  He opens his eyes. They are the most beautiful topaz eyes I have ever seen. “Free me, Daughter of Earth,” he rumbles.

  “Is it really you?” I demand. “Is it true?”

  “I have suffered enough!” As he heaves his paws, trying to pull free from the sand, I see that he’s bound down with huge iron chains.

  “What are you doing here? Why you?” My voice is rising to a shriek. “When did you Fall?”

  I woke with a start, and was surprised to find how late it was. Last night after Azazel’s booty-call I’d showered and crawled into bed early, aching and shaking—and then slept right through the morning, by the looks of things.

  “Damn,” I mumbled to myself, flailing around for clothes. My heart was still pounding from the dream and my stomach was churning with anxiety. I had to talk to Egan, I told myself, hurrying through my ablutions.

  What’s he hiding from me? What’s the secret that the angel, whoever he is, keeps? Does Egan know?

  What is the Church hiding?

  I dragged a brush through my hair as a final concession to respectability and then rattled down the uncarpeted stairs and along the barrel-roofed corridor to Egan’s door. I could hear the murmur of his voice, and I was so agitated by now that I didn’t knock. I just forgot.

  “Egan, tell me about Gabriel!” I demanded as I stalked in. Egan was dressed, which was something. He was sitting blamelessly at his table, clad in his cassock, looking into an open laptop; and at my intrusion he looked up with his mouth open, aghast. “He’s here in Rome,” I snarled. “I know he is! Why’s he here? Why’s he tied up?”

  Egan shut his mouth, slammed the laptop closed and jumped to his feet. “Get your stuff,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Get anything you need. You’ve got two minutes. We’re out of here.” He hurried to his chest of drawers and began to fling things into a small rucksack. “Hurry. Do you have cash?”

  I was still fixated on my dream-memory. “Some—Why?”

  “Because that was Don Giuseppe online—” he stabbed his hand at the computer “—and he heard you. And the Gendarmeria are going to be coming for you right now. We have to go!”

  “I, uh…” I didn’t have anything to fetch from my room, except clothes. “What’s happened?”

  He grabbed the bag. “You just made yourself into an enemy again. Do you have anything else you need to get?”

  “No!”

  “Good. We need to shift our arses this minute.” Seizing my arm, he pushed me out of the room and then took the lead, towing me down the corridor.

  Just like that, we were on the run again.

  Stunned by the turn of events, I didn’t protest or ask any questions. I kept quiet as we scuttled out of the hostel, dodged across three streets, and then flung ourselves into a white taxi-cab that Egan practically body-checked in the road.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, much more meekly, as we pulled away into the Rome traffic, heading at his command for Roma Termini.

  “Quiet.” A flash of his eyes indicated the driver. “Talk later.”

  I dug my fingers into my thighs and obeyed, keeping silent as we wove through the streets—sometimes quickly, sometimes snarled up by other cars. My heart was racing. I’d done something terrible, I realized. I just wasn’t entirely clear as to what that was.

  We couldn’t cut through the city center so we went south, skirting past the Colosseum. I stared up at its arched curve, wondering at all the people who had died in there, and whether they’d found meaning in their sacrifice.

  Roma Termini was a big railway station, it turned out, but Egan made the cab stop some distance away, not out at the front. He didn’t wait for his change but added a blessing in Italian, then hurried me away. I thought we’d head for the main concourse, but he took us down a back street.

  “This is a rough area, be careful,” he said, and I could sort of see that; even during the day there were groups of underdressed women hanging about on the street corners, obviously looking for trade, and in places the litter was piled nearly as high as the tide-mark of graffiti.

  He found us an arched entrance that seemed to lead into the station. A policeman dressed in gray-blue pants and a dark blue jacket and cap was leaning there, smoking.

  “Wait,” Egan muttered, then sauntered away toward the policeman. His body-language changed as he slowed; he was suddenly, obviously, a young priest in a black robe, looking a little embarrassed.

  The poli
ceman looked up at his greeting and his question, then grinned and fished inside his pocket. They stepped back into the shadow of the arch as a cigarette packet appeared. Egan glanced around once, moved in to take the cigarette—and then there was a sudden flurry of movement I didn’t understand and an embrace.

  I moved forward slowly, my heart clogging my throat, in time to see Egan lower the policeman gently to the ground, releasing his neck from the chokehold, and then remove his sidearm from its holster. He hitched up his cassock to slip the pistol into his waistband, looked around again, and signaled me to cross into the arch.

  “Is he okay?” I asked, as I approached the policeman’s unconscious form. Egan was using the man’s bright white gun belt to truss his elbows together behind his back. He worked with shocking efficiency.

  “He’s fine. Get that bin open.”

  I obeyed. This was way beyond me. Egan heaved the limp body into the recycling skip full of cardboard and shucked off his cassock to fling it in alongside. Then we walked on past the bollards and the traffic barrier into the back of the station. I shoved my hands into my sleeves to stop them shaking.

  “Get some cash out.” He stood guard over me as I fleeced the ATM of a wad of euros. “Okay, let’s take that train.” He nodded across the tracks to another platform.

  “We haven’t got tickets,” I protested as we headed down the subway stairs to cross beneath the tracks.

  “Tickets will take too long; we can just pay the fine onboard.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Anywhere not here.”

  This was not what I’d bargained for when I flounced downstairs full of indignation and questions. How had things changed so quickly?

  We piled into the train, whose LED screen proclaimed it was heading to Civitavecchia, with seconds to go before it pulled out from the platform. This was no express, I realized as it clanked out of the station; it was probably just some local train, and we were lucky enough to walk up the row and find a carriage that was all but empty. Egan waved me into a seat as far as possible from the other passengers and dropped down opposite me, his knapsack in his lap. He’d been wearing a thin gray sweater under his cassock; when he sat now it rode up slightly over the bulge of the stolen gun, and he twitched the wool back into place to hide it.