“Probably.”
Cassie looked at her watch. “I got my occupational therapy class in five minutes. Can I go now?”
“Yes.”
She stood up from the chair, suddenly remembering. “Oh, can I ask a favor?”
R.J. looked sarcastically quizzical. “Maybe.”
“Can I move to the room at the end of the hall, on the left?”
“Why?”
“ ’Cos there’s a view of the garden.”
“Why should I give you privileges after what you did in the shower?”
“Because you’re a cool guy.”
“You think you can manipulate me with flattery?”
“You’re also probably the best shrink I’ve ever had.”
“That won’t work—”
“And handsome.”
R.J. smiled. “I’m disappointed, Cassie. I thought you were a lot more sophisticated than that. And the answer is no.”
“I’m glad you said that.” Cassie smiled a great big smile. She pointed to his Notre Dame hat. “They play University of Maryland tonight, don’t they? Maryland’s supposed to kick their butts bad?”
R.J. looked immediately enthused. “How do you know that? You’re a college football fan?”
Cassie scoffed. “Jeez, no—football’s for morons. Come on, a bunch of steroid-bloated idiots running back and forth with a leather bag full of air, makin’ five million a year.”
Now R.J. frowned. “Then how do you know that Notre Dame’s slated to lose big to Maryland?”
“I just know.”
“And your point?”
“Are you a betting man?”
R.J. shook his head, leaning back in the chair. “So that’s it. You want to bet—for a new room assignment. Ain’t gonna happen, Cassie. I’m a doctor. I can’t make bets with patients.”
“It’s not really a bet. What would you say if I told you Maryland’s gonna lose 22-0?”
“I’d laugh hard.”
“You wouldn’t believe it ‘cos Notre Dame kind’a sucks, right?”
R.J. took an instant offense. “They don’t
suck.
They’re... having a rebuilding year.”
“Fine. They suck. So that’s the deal. If Maryland loses 22-0, you move me to the new room, okay?”
R.J. laughed. “Okay, Cassie, you’ve got a deal.”
She could still hear him laughing by the time she got off the admin wing.
Later that night, R.J. moved Cassie into the new room.
“Thanks,” she said.
He cast her the sharpest frown. “I don’t know how you pulled that off. And don’t tell me you’re clairvoyant. I’m a behavioral psychiatrist, I don’t believe in crap like that.”
“Believe,” Cassie intoned. She sat down on the stiff bed, bouncing her butt on it a few times. “You should be happy. Your team won.”
“Yeah. 22-0. When every sportswriter in the country said they’d get their tails kicked. I should’ve called my bookie and bet my life savings.”
“You behavioral psychiatrists are too skeptical.”
He stood at the door, looking down at her as she sat on the edge of the bed. “You’re a very interesting young woman, Cassie.”
“Yeah. Interesting. But not crazy.”
“You’re probably right. Goodnight. See you at breakfast.”
“Go, Fighting Irish!”
R.J. left, locked the door behind her. Immediately she got up and looked out the decoratively barred window.
Yep, there’s a garden, all right.
A spotlight lit up the small fenced court but it wasn’t much. This time of the year, in Florida? A couple of short palm trees and a couple of flowerbeds that were turning brown.
Better than nothing,
she conceded. But the garden wasn’t the genuine reason she’d wanted this room.
“All right. So where are you?” she said to the air.
Angelese’s voice wafted into the room like smoke. “Right here... You just didn’t see me.” At this hour, only one emergency light remained on in the room, leaving three corners dark. From the darkness in one of those corners, Angelese emerged, like a lapse-dissolve in reverse.
“I’m glad you got the room,” the angel said.
“It was easy. Thanks for the tip on the football game.”
“Men really are easy to manipulate, aren’t they?”
“Yeah, but I think he would’ve given it to me anyway eventually. He was just busting my chops a little about the business in the shower.” Cassie peered more intently as the angel fully revealed herself. “So you’ve been there the whole time, in the dark?”
“Yeah. I told you. Caliginauts
like
the dark. We were bred to exist in it. Angels who go where devils go.”
“So if R.J. walked back in right now,” Cassie asked, “he wouldn’t see you?”
“Nope.”
“Why not?”
“ ’Cos he’s human.”
“So am I,” Cassie felt she needed to point out.
“You’re more than that.” Angelese’s voice reverberated.
“You’re an Etheress.”
I keep forgetting that,
Cassie thought. “I was scared. After the shower thing, I didn’t hear from you for hours. After what that thing did to you? I thought you were dead.”
Angelese had never looked so real before. The sheer white gown nearly glowed, as did her equally white hair. She shimmered, but she was flesh this time, not a projection through some spell. She sat down on the bed. “Angels are immortal in the Netherplanes: Heaven, Hell, and some other places. But here in the Living World we can die. It takes a lot.”
“You went
through
a lot.” Cassie gulped, remembering how viciously the angel had been savaged by the Umbra-Specter’s talons and teeth. The blood had poured out of her, blood like red neon light.
“But an Umbra-Specter doesn’t pull much weight,” Angelese continued with her explanation. “It can’t kill anybody—it’s one of the Rules. An incantation is what gives it life, but it’s not a powerful enough incantation to allow it to kill outside of its realm. All it can do is hurt.” One of the angel’s fingers unconsciously traced one of the scars that rose past the neckline of her gown. Cassie noted more scars around her ankles and arms.
“Angels are stronger than humans, physically and mentally. When we feel pleasure, it’s ten times greater than the pleasure you’d feel.”
“But the same goes for pain, too, I guess.”
Angelese nodded, smiling. “But the scars heal pretty quickly. They never fully go away, but almost.” She pulled the hem of her gown up to her knees. Cassie gulped again. The angel was a mural of varying degrees of wounds. Some were lines full of clotted blood, others like heavy tracks of flesh-colored wax, and beneath all that were the faintest threads, like spider webs.
“So this room is—what?” Cassie asked. “A Dead-Point?”
“A Death-Point. Don’t confuse it with a Deadpass. A Dead-Point’s just a place where tragedy accumulates—I told you what used to happen in this room a long time ago. Caliginauts thrive in Dead-Points, but certain other kinds of angels wouldn’t be able to come near this room. That’s why we get duty like this.”
Duty,
Cassie thought. “You’re not here because you want to be, right. I mean, who could want to be tortured by that shadow thing? You’re here to do a job. You were ordered to come here, right?”
“Right.”
“By who?”
Angelese’s smile peaked, and the room’s dark corners seemed to brighten when she said: “God.”
I’m
not touching that one,
Cassie thought. She was tired and not in a very good mood. She lay down on the cot. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”
“I think you do.”
“No I don’t. I’m going to sleep.”
“You can go to sleep.”
“What about you?” The sudden question nagged. Damn,
there’s only one bed.
She hitched over. “You can sleep here too. You don’t have to worry, I’m not a lesbian if that’s what you think.”
Angelese’s laughter fluttered. “Oh, I know...” Now her arms were outspread; she was levitating facedown, floating up into the air. “And besides, angels don’t sleep.”
Tired as she was, Cassie’s curiosity kicked back in. “Do angels ... have sex?”
“There are many different kinds and orders of angels. Most have to deny their desires as a gesture of love toward God. There are some angels that can breed, and several other orders of angels who don’t have any genitals, and a few others that have both.”
The image threw Cassie’s mind for a loop. “That’s a little too much information, thank you!”
“And as for my order, we have to be celibate, like Jesus. It’s easy.”
Cassie frowned, hugging the pillow. Easy! “I’m twenty-three years old and I haven’t even
had
sex. I think about it all the friggin’ time. Anytime I meet a guy I like I wind up just saying to hell with it ’cos if I did have sex, I’d lose all my Etheric Powers. If I’m not a virgin, I can’t be an Etheress, right?”
“Right. It’s a supreme sacrifice that you’re making for God.”
Cassie ground her teeth. “You want me to be honest? I’m not even making it for God. I’m making it for me, I’m making it for my sister. I have to stay an Etheress or I’ll never see my sister again. So how do you like that? It’s not for God.”
“Oh, yes it is. It’s just very complex. You’re not sophisticated enough to understand.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“No human being is.”
Cassie felt flustered, huddled on the cot. “I just don’t know how long I can keep this up. It pisses me off sometimes.”
Angelese was floating off her feet, smiling down. “We all have our trials, Cassie. You face yours very well.”
Crap on that,
Cassie thought. “How can not ever having sex be
easy?
How can it be
easy
to deny all sexual desire?”
“It’s very easy. I’m celibate because it’s a sign of the Kingdom where all of our love will be universal as God is universal. I’m celibate in the imitation of Jesus, who elected to be bound to no one in
particular
so that he might be embraced by
all,
in an eternal covenant of living sacrifice.”
That’s some answer!
Cassie thought.
“Let me put it this way,” Angelese added. “All you’d have to do is see Heaven just one time and you’d know ...”
Cassie had no comeback for that. “Lissa should be in Heaven.”
“She should be, but she’s not. She committed suicide.”
“She wasn’t sinful, she was a good person.”
“I know, but it’s one of the Rules.”
“Then the Rules
suck!”
Cassie blurted, frustrated. “She’ll never see Heaven, and it’s my fault. She’s condemned to Hell because of me.”
“She’s condemned to Hell because of human error. It’s got nothing to do with you. We are each our own keeper.”
The smile again. It always seemed sort of mocking. “I thought you were tired. I I thought you didn’t want to talk any more.”
I don’t,
she thought, but more questions kept swooping down, as well as things she needed clarified. She stuck to the basics; it wasn’t as scary. “You came here to—”
“To get you out. To guide you to another Deadpass, to get you back into the Mephistopolis.”
“Before Lucifer’s people can abduct me.” Cassie hoped she’d gotten it straight.
“My job is to slip you out of here before he can. And I’ve already told you, he’s going to try.”
“Why?”
“Lucifer needs you, but so does God.”
Wow,
Cassie thought.
It’s
so nice to be
wanted.
“And that’s what those merge things were about, what we heard on the news?”
“Yeah,” Angelese said. “Spatial Merging—Satan’s latest necromantic art. Lucifer’s Warlocks have devised a way to allow a district in Hell to share the same space with a part of the Living World. It only lasts for a few minutes but that’s all it takes. They do it by killing millions of inhabitants at the same instant.”
“Huh?”
“It’s at a place in the Panzuzu District, called the Atrocidome.”
“Huh?” Cassie repeated.
Angelese explained further, hands clasped calmly in her lap: “In Hell, sorcery replaces science. For a thousand years, Satan has been trying to find a way, through sorcery, to harness energy for use in the Black Arts. That’s why he built the Atrocidome. Think of it as a football stadium, only a hundred times bigger. It’s a virtual coliseum designed solely for the purpose of transferring lifeforce energy into another medium. To effect a Spatial Merge, it takes a massive amount of energy. And we know they’ve been doing it, they’ve been succeeding. The fires downtown the other night, and that place in Maryland? Those were Merge sites. It won’t be long before Lucifer orders a Merge here, and that’s when he’ll make his move.”