“Hope,” Michael warned as the man closed in. “Don’t do anything stupid.”
The man grinned stupidly as he closed the distance between us, looming overhead.
I heard the rush of wings behind me. “No,” I ordered Michael, raising a hand to stop his intervention. “I’ve got this.”
The man pulled up short at the sight of Michael, confused. “Wha—”
I didn’t give him a chance to finish. With one swift move, I wrapped my arms around his neck and chest, immobilizing his arm. He struggled against me, the gun going off aimlessly, taking out one of the light bulbs and showering us in a rain of shattered glass.
I brought a well-aimed knee into his gut and then aimed lower. His knees gave out and I let go, stripping away the handgun as I let him collapse, helpless, on the floor. He clutched at himself and writhed on the floor in pain.
“Are you done?” Michael asked from behind me as I stood, panting, over the man.
I shook my head, breathless. “Knock him out for me.”
I stepped over him and turned to watch as Michael swung the blunt handle of his sword against the man’s head, rendering him unconscious.
“Respect,” Michael intoned, eyeing me thoughtfully as I bent over, hands on knees, and caught my breath.
I shrugged, pulling myself upright. “I learned how to take care of myself. Just in case. Come on, we need to keep going.”
One by one, we got the doors unlocked. What we found sickened us. Women and children, cringing like animals inside cages meant for dogs. Chained to walls. Or left loose, but with crushed spirits and drugged bodies that rendered them incapable of escape, wallowing in filth and decay.
They cowered as we peered at them. Some wept. I looked at them carefully, knowing that any one of them might be Rorie or Macey. But none of them were.
We didn’t have time to comfort them. We kept working our way down the hall, simply unchaining and unlocking and leaving them to wander, free, in our wake.
A few more oafish guards tried to stop us, but we dispatched them with ease and used the chains and shackles we found inside the rooms to immobilize them, unconscious, to keep them out of our way.
And finally, we came to the end of the hall. The last door.
The others converged on us at the same time. I don’t know why I had expected Enoch to change himself into something more suitable for battle. He was just as roly-poly as ever, his rolls of fat on display in the costume of a sumo wrestler, massive wings flapping behind him for extra momentum as he waddled toward us, leaning heavily into his cane for support. Raph stalked behind him, breathing heavily, a sheen of sweat across his brow. He was magnificent in his armor, each panel articulating his muscles, their surfaces engraved with great battle scenes of history. A snowy white tunic and short leather skirt grazed his knees.
I did a double take. A trickle of blood ran down Raph’s armor, congealing around the tiny figures where it had been trapped, splatters of it marring the ivory linen that swung gracefully below.
It was the only time I’d seem him appear even remotely ruffled.
“Disgusting human filth,” he spat, shaking his head over what he’d just found. He drew his hand from behind him, tossing something on the floor at my feet.
I stared down, expecting to see his sword.
“Is that—?” My voice trailed off, shocked.
Raph nodded curtly. “A brand. Like those used on animals.” He kicked it with his booted toe. “Even my hippie friend couldn’t take it,” he added, jerking his head roughly toward Enoch.
“I never said I was a pacifist,” Enoch replied, brandishing his cane. “For once, Raph and I agreed on something. I have to say, I enjoyed meting out punishment more than I expected,” he admitted, awkwardly adjusting his sumo belt as he leaned over on his knees, trying to catch his breath.
“Careful there!” Raph winced, shielding his eyes from the flash of bare skin to which Enoch had inadvertently exposed him. Enoch ignored him as he struggled upright, continuing his story.
“And those poor dogs. They were fighting dogs, too. Bloody business, that,” he continued, rubbing a gnarled hand over his grizzled beard. “Though I think when it is all said and done, the dogs were treated better than the girls we found. Yes, if ever punishment was deserved, it was deserved by the men and women who run this operation.”
I looked more closely at the knob on the top of his cane as he leaned into it for support. A thin smear of blood glistened under his fingers.
“Tabby,” I said sharply, a stab of fear gripping my heart. I wheeled around, scanning the hallways for her. “Where’s Tabby?”
“Relax,” Raph said behind breaths. “We transported ourselves over, angel style; she had to drive. One of the more mundane limitations of being human. She’ll be right behind us. We cleared out the whole front, so you have nothing to worry about. She’ll be perfectly safe when she gets here.”
I nodded, grateful that they’d thought it through. Still, my mouth was dry, parched with fear. I looked at Michael and then to the door before us, my stomach roiling.
The screaming of my nerve endings, the buzzing of my brain, now a steady insistent whining that would not stop, was all the confirmation I needed. This had to be it. Macey and Rorie had to be here.
We had seen horrible things, each of us, all the way to this moment—but this was going to be, by far, the worst.
What would we find behind this door?
I looked back up at Michael, searching his eyes. The stormy gray in them was resolute. He locked eyes with me and simply nodded. I walked up to the door, feeling the phalanx of angels close ranks protectively behind me.
Breathing heavily, I turned the knob. To our surprise, it turned easily beneath my hand, and the door swung open. We shuffled in, cautious, scanning the room.
I caught my breath.
In the corner, on a bare mattress, tangled in dirty sheets, my sister was cradling Macey’s limp body. Blood was dripping from Macey’s wrists, pooling underneath them and seeping into the thin mattress, her life draining away.
I stared in shock as I watched Rorie rock Macey back and forth, back and forth, her face glistening with tears. It took her a moment to notice us. When she did, her response was odd. She paid no notice to the fact that I came accompanied by angels dressed in armor. She didn’t notice the wings or swords. I realized, with a start, that she had probably seen it once before—as a witness to our mother’s beating. She ignored it all, accepting it as just as much of her new reality as the filthy mattress upon which she sat. Instead, she focused her attention on me.
“You came,” she said, smiling tremulously through her tears. “He said you wouldn’t, but I knew you would. I knew you and Mom wouldn’t give up on me, Hope.”
She still didn’t know our mother was dead.
“Rorie—” But I broke off, unable to speak as I watched her cradling Macey.
“I tried to stop her, Hope,” Rorie whispered, gazing down at her friend’s face with a profound gentleness. She caressed Macey’s cold cheek. “But I couldn’t. She didn’t believe me when I said it would get better. I couldn’t save her, Hope. I couldn’t save her.”
“She smuggled a razor out of the motel room,” a dark voice offered by way of explanation.
I turned, startled, to see a young man seated in the corner, watching the scene impassively. “I don’t know how she managed to sneak it past Enrique, my bouncer,” he added with a shrug. “But sooner or later something like this happens.”
He rose from the chair, uncoiling his body like a serpent. When the outline of his body began to blur and melt, his form collapsing in on itself in a rush of twinkling light and stench of sulfur, I was not surprised. I had known all along that at the end of our journey, we would find Rorie with him. Always him, haunting and hurting my family.
“Lucas,” I acknowledged as he emerged, his body reformed into that of a warrior, clad as ever in black armor.
“It took you long enough,” he a
dmonished with a shake of his jet wings, sending a rush of hot, sulfured air our way.
I felt the angels stiffen behind me. None of us moved as we watched him walk over to Rorie. He crouched down and slowly, reverently, began stroking her hair.
My skin crawled at the idea of his hands on her.
“Do you know how long I have waited?” he began, never lifting his eyes from Rorie’s tear-stained face. “I was watching from the very beginning, you know. I was there when you blessed her. I was there when you gifted her with the things you thought would protect her. What you didn’t realize, though, is that I gave her my own gift, too.” He lifted his eyes to pin us with a look of bemusement, continuing to stroke her hair.
“I gave her the gift of endurance, knowing that one day, I would bring her to the brink of destruction. I would bring her so close to death, leaving her longing for it, but I would never, ever let her have that release.” He let his hand rest on her bare shoulder. Only then did I realize Rorie was sitting in nothing but a thin tank top and underwear, the thin sheets the only barrier against cold.
“Look at her,” he ordered, suddenly grabbing her lank hair and jerking her head around. “Really look at her.”
I saw the dark circles under her eyes.
I saw the bruises, yellow and purple, that mottled her skin, a map of the abuse she had suffered. The indignity of the brand burned into her, still oozing from infection.
I counted the scratches and burns and cuts. I noted the swelling around her eye, the puffiness about her mouth, and I knew, then, that her wounds were much deeper than what the eye could see.
Rorie twisted her head away from his grip and cleared her throat.
“Nothing a little beauty sleep can’t cure,” she whispered, a brief flash of defiance disappearing from her eyes almost the instant I saw it.
“Shut up!” Lucas shouted, backhanding her across the face.
She pulled her body inward, being careful not to spill Macey from her lap, and she covered her mouth. But not before I saw a smile flutter across her face.
If she could provoke him, she could win. It was the simple calculus of a girl who had nothing but her wits, now; no other source of power. It was all that she had left, and she was wielding it as best she could.
Michael surged forward, his mighty hand already shaped into a fist, ready to strike, but I put out an arm and stopped him, shaking my head slightly. I could feel him trembling with anger, his fingers gripped tight in futility as he watched his girl nursing her cut lip. I felt a pang for him; he loved her as much as I did. But we couldn’t move too soon—not until we were certain we could get Rorie away safely.
Lucas noticed none of this. He just continued his raging.
“This is your fault!” he screamed, pointing at me. “Your fault! If you hadn’t interfered to begin with, this never would have happened. But you had to meddle in the things of Heaven—things that had nothing to do with you. You had no right!”
“That’s not true,” I asserted, struggling to keep my voice calm, taking a careful step forward, one eye on Lucas, the other trained on Rorie. “I was the Bearer. What happened to you, what happened to all of us—” I gestured about to the angels behind me—“it was meant to be, Lucas. It was as much my story as yours.”
“No!” he shrieked, gripping his head, wild with pain. The pain he was suffering—how much worse it had to be than the pain I’d felt, just before, as God admonished me to hurry up.
As his eyes rolled back in his head, I felt a surprising emotion —pity.
“Lucas,” I whispered, taking another step closer to the dirty mattress. “Lucas, it doesn’t have to be this way.”
He scrambled back into the corner, dragging my listless sister with him.
“You turned my army against me, you cleaved it in half with your offer of forgiveness!”
“It wasn’t my offer. It was God’s.”
“It should never have been made!” he continued, his face contorting as he spoke. “Look at this!” he gestured wildly about him. “Look at the way you humans use one another. Look at the way you treat the gift of life and free will He has given you. How can you look at what has happened to your sister and believe that humanity deserves the place in the cosmos that God has granted it?
“Don’t you see?” he pleaded, beseeching me to see things from his perspective. “Humans don’t deserve His grace. And I cannot accept His grace—not if it is conditional upon my acceptance of your kind.”
He watched, looking for any sign of doubt. Then he took a different tack.
“You know, you’re not so different than me, Hope,” he began with a silky voice. “The Devil’s Advocate. Isn’t that what your boss called you? It was just a job, wasn’t it? A role he asked you to play so you could forget the truth about Ike Washington. You had a job to do, to whisper in the ear of the judge and convince her that Ike Washington was guilty. You had the evidence; you just had to ignore the surrounding circumstances so that you could live with yourself.”
I winced, remembering all those records—the Social Services reports, the notes scrawled by concerned teachers in the margins of failing report cards, the detritus of a life ruined before it had even began. Yes, it had been my job to ignore all those things and make my case. And even now, it filled me with shame that I had done it.
Lucas continued, his voice winding about my guilty conscience like a sinewy snake.
“My job was—and is—the same. My job is to make God see things my way, whether He wants to see them or not.” He smiled indulgently as he watched his words hit their mark. “The only difference is,” he whispered, “I believe in what I’m doing. How can you blame me for doing it, Hope, when it’s what you’ve done, too?”
He searched my face, hoping for collapse or, at the very least, acquiescence. But I wouldn’t let him burden me with this, too—not now. Not with so much at stake. His hopes dashed, Lucas scrambled wildly about him, pulling a dagger from the folds of linen under his breastplate.
“If I have to kill Rorie myself, I will get you to admit it,” he said. “I will get you to admit that humanity deserves eradication.”
“That won’t do anything, Lucas,” Michael interjected, his voice a low growl of warning.
“It will prove me right,” Lucas snapped back. He held the tip of the dagger against Rorie’s neck, pressing it so tightly against the carotid that I could see it moving with every pulse of blood, as if one with the vein.
“Don’t you think there’s been enough killing? Wasn’t it enough to kill their mother?” Enoch interjected.
Lucas’s head snapped back. “What do you mean?”
So he didn’t realize, either. My tongue was thick, the grief coming afresh. It was Michael that answered.
“When you left Mona, you left her for dead. She didn’t survive your beating.”
For a moment, Lucas looked stunned. Quickly, though, his face hardened into a mask of hate.
“That’s nothing to me. Collateral damage. And I’ll kill again if it serves my purpose. If it hurts you,” he hissed, pulling Rorie tighter against him.
I felt the bile rising in my throat. But then, amid my own warring feelings of panic and anger, I felt something else.
I raised my hand, warning off the angels behind me as I heard them stir. Then I stepped forward and crouched down, so close to the edge of the mattress that I could smell the urine and sweat that had penetrated it, could nearly taste the tangy iron of blood that even now seeped into it.
Lucas pulled my sister tight against his chest, the dagger barely pricking her neck, leaving a bead of blood to swell and drip against her white skin. He strained away from me, pressing himself against the walls. His wild eyes were nearly all white. He frothed, spittle spraying from his mouth as he spilled his words.
“Rorie, Macey—all of this. I planned it all. All to bring you down, to make you realize how wrong you have been. You took away my spot. You, the Shield? That was my role! My place in Heaven. Or did he not
tell you that when he so generously offered it to you?” He sneered at Michael behind me. “Don’t you hate me? Don’t you hate yourself, that your mistakes brought your family to such ruin?”
I looked at Rorie, clutched against Lucas’s chest. Her eyes were as defeated as Lucas’s were wild. I thrust away the feelings of guilt and inadequacy that his words provoked. I couldn’t change what had happened.
But there was one thing I could still do.
“I don’t hate you,” I whispered, tearing my gaze from Rorie to look Lucas full in the eye. “I can only imagine how you must feel— the centuries of hate and pain, eating away at you. I remember—I know what it’s like,” I added, crawling over the mattress and sitting before him. I reached out and placed my hand over his, where he held the dagger against my sister’s throat. I felt the heat surging from him to me, heat that might have come from Raph or Enoch or even Michael. He eyed me warily.
“I couldn’t understand Michael’s reasoning, sometimes, back then in Istanbul while we looked for the Key,” I said. “He would hurt me, if not physically, then with his words—maybe on purpose, maybe because he didn’t know any better, couldn’t find any way to handle it. He wasn’t the same then. He wasn’t himself, and I couldn’t reach him. I felt so … small. So helpless. I was angry, then, angry with God for punishing Michael that way. I couldn’t understand what good it would do to punish him that way. I was afraid it would only drive him further from God …
“Nobody could go through that unchanged, Lucas. I don’t think anyone could understand what you have gone through. I won’t pretend to accept what you have done to my family, but I understand how, in your pain-addled mind, you thought you were doing what you had to do.”
I took a deep breath and picked up his free hand, clasping it between my two.
“I don’t accept it, but I can feel sorry for you. Please. If you must take somebody, don’t take Rorie. She has suffered enough. Take me. I’m the one you really want.”
“No!” Rorie’s strangled cry cut the silence. Lucas pulled her closer, eyeing me with suspicion. Quietly, I moved toward him. He scrambled away, wrapping his arm even more tightly around Rorie’s neck.
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