“Cassie, I’m a
Fallen Angel.
Your jive doesn’t work on me ...”
Then he opened the first tourniquet and deliberated over which arm or leg to cut off first.
(III)
Angelese strained against the unbreakable wires of the Warding Spell. She was trapped in a radiating cage of negative energy. Every arcane counter-measure she knew she’d used, every Reverse Hex and Repulsion Charm. Nothing worked.
I can’t get out,
came the futile thought.
I was sent by God to protect Cassie ... and I’ve failed. I’ve totally, utterly, falled ...
In all the thousands of years that she had lived, she’d never felt so useless.
Despairing, she looked down at her feet. The shadow of her body extended a yard or so from her feet.
Wait a second ...
She took a step sideways. The corridor lights from the clinic had long-since failed, all electricity severed by the Merge. But there was still sufficient light coming from a fire that sputtered out from a hellish wall to her left. It was that fire-light that projected her shadow.
She back-stepped, a little closer to the flame. It lengthened her shadow another two yards.
Now her shadow extended well past the outer boundary of the Warding strictures.
I don’t know if this will work, but it can’t hurt to try ...
She chuckled to herself.
Well, I guess it really can hurt to try ...
She began to speak. She began to give voice to the most crucial secret she’d ever been told, the most important utterance of knowledge in living history. She began to say aloud: “And on the twelfth day, God created—”
—and when she spoke the rest of it, her Umbra-Specter came alive in a rage, the shadows of its foot-long talons rising off the floor.
The evil glee percolated in its voice: “Thank you!” it rejoiced. “Now I get to tear you up ...”
(IV)
“You’re ... very pretty,” the Fallen Angel observed. He’d already applied the pre-packaged tourniquets to her arms and legs, which were now going numb. His hand smoothed over her belly, then up to her cheek. Cassie couldn’t even flinch in the spell of paralysis he’d put on her. Her disgust and her hatred boiled over in her mind but she remained powerless against this obviously higher being.
Behind them, still hovering, the mouth of the Nectoport had opened fully. Through it, Cassie knew, he would take her to a secure location in the Mephistopolis, where the monarch of the city, and his lieges, would do what they would with her, expropriating her powers with their occult science, for some unknown design. She would never see Lissa again. She would never see anything again.
God help me,
she prayed, but what good would praying do now? Cassie knew there was a God, but why should God do anything for her?
I never did anything for Him,
she regretted.
And a darker notion: Perhaps God
couldn’t
do anything for her, even if He wanted to. Maybe God really was losing his battles.
“He is, Cassie,” R.J. said, usurping her thoughts. “He’s losing so bad it’s funny. And He deserves it. Let’s just say he’s not keen on democracy. We deserved as much as He, but he threw us out.”
“You turned your back on Him first, didn’t you?” Cassie managed.
The Fallen Angel glared at her, teeth grinding.
“Isn’t that how it happened? He gave you something but you turned your back on Him anyway?”
Veins stood out on R.J.’s forehead.
“Sounds to me like God gave you a great gift and instead of saying thank you, you gave Him the finger. Instead of being grateful, you said ‘Fuck you, God. I want more.’ ”
The Fallen Angel’s hands quivered in rage as they closed around Cassie’s throat. His face had turned beet-red.
Cassie smiled—a weak smile but a smile nonetheless. “I’m glad He threw you out,” she whispered. “I hope your anguish and your misery and your pain lasts for a million years.”
His hands continued to shake on her throat, but then they came away. “Nothing you can say will make me violate my oath. You have no conception. You want me to kill you but I will not. Instead, I will take you to him, as I promised. When he’s done with you, when he’s changed the Living World to what it should’ve been all along, and when you are drained and depleted and useless, perhaps he’ll give you to me ... or I should say, your torso.”
He brought the bone saw to her leg, just under the tourniquet. “I will relish this,” he said, about to cut.
Suddenly his scalp was sizzling. It sounded like a raw steak dropped on a red-hot grill. He jerked back, howling, as his scalp peeled off as though he were wearing a beret and someone just slipped it off his head from behind.
The
someone
was Angelese.
Cassie looked but still couldn’t move. Angelese’s face glowed in streaks from a grievous wound. Four deep slash-marks. But she smiled calmly, then knelt before R.J. who shuddered on the floor. “No, her jive doesn’t work on you, but mine does. So you like to dismember people?” She grabbed R.J.’s upper arm, and her hand burned through the flesh and bone. The arm fell off, cauterized. His screams shook the building’s foundation as she did the same to his other arm, and then his legs. The flesh continued to sizzle as smoke rose.
“There,” Angelese said very quietly.
The head on R.J.’s torso looked at her, beseeching. “We’re going to win. You know that, don’t you?”
“Not
you,
brother. You
lose.”
“Just kill me. Burn out my heart.”
“That’s too easy. That’s too merciful, and not all angels are merciful. No, I won’t kill you. I’ll send you back to your piss-ant master—a total failure. What will he do to you, your Son of the Morning? What will he do to you for letting him down?” and with that, Angelese picked up the Fallen Angel’s living torso—
“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”
—and heaved it into the Nectoport.
“ ’Bye,” Angelese said.
The Nectoport’s maw snapped shut, then it disappeared.
Angelese sighed, sat up on the desk. “Are you all right?” she asked Cassie.
“I’m friggin’ paralyzed!”
“Oh, what’d he do, lay a Paresis Spell on you? It’ll wear off in a minute now that he’s gone.”
Actually, Cassie could feel the effects dulling already. She leaned up on the counter as much as she could. “Thanks
... What was that all about? Your touch burns?”
“I’m blessed, he isn’t. I can kill any lower-grade Fallen Angel just by placing my hands on him.”
Nifty,
Cassie thought. And her good fortune. Then she peered around, alarmed. “I’m all right, but you definitely aren’t. What happened to your face? And how did you get out of that Warding Hex?”
“I told a
big
secret, so my Umbra-Specter came alive and slashed my face. It also slashed the Warding lines in the process.”
Cassie gaped at the straight gouge-like wounds. “It must’ve hurt like ...”
“Like a motherfucker,” the angel said.
Cassie winced. Her paralysis continued to lift, and she noticed that the strange charge in the air was weakening.
“The Merge’ll be over in another few minutes,” Angelese informed.
But Cassie was astonished at what she was seeing now: the angel had reached into the desk and removed a cigarette. She was lighting it.
“Angels
smoke?”
she asked.
“I’ve had a tough day, and so have you. Let’s get out of here.”
She helped Cassie to her feet, then led her out of the Merged exam room. Yes, the charge in the air was definitely losing its vitality, but they were still in a meld of Hellspace.
We’re not out of the woods yet,
Cassie realized. In this wing of the clinic, there was an exit door at the end, but when they turned the corner—
“Oh, gimme a break,” Angelese muttered.
At the end of the hall stood a black-garbed Grand Duke, oxen-headed, eight feet tall, overly muscled shoulders spanning a meter at least. Its eyes smoldered, and the horns jutting from its rippled forehead were longer and sharper than those of a mature bull.
Behind the monster stood a platoon of slavering Ushers, some armed with bloody halberds, some with broadswords, some with spiked cudgels, yet all with newly honed talons, mouths full of teeth like long shards of glass.
The voice resonated. “Etheress. I am Grand Duke Lescoriere of the First Infernal Brigade. I am charged with the duty of escorting you to the Mephisto Building. The property owner would be honored to receive you as his welcome guest. He has much to discuss with you, and much to share. He has blessings of wonder to bestow—good things, all. And on my immortal soul, I guarantee your safety.”
“Sit on your horns, dickhead,” Angelese said
“If you come of your own accord—you, Etheress, and your confidante—you will be rewarded beyond all imagination.”
Cassie grinned. “I’ll go with you on one condition.”
“Speak it, Etheress, and it will be done.”
“Cut your head off,” Cassie said.
The Grand Duke, unblinking, took a broadsword from one of the Ushers, held it straight out by the haft, and flicked his corded wrist. The blade blurred backward and popped the Grand Duke’s head off his shoulders like a disconnected jack-in-the-box.
“You gotta be shitting me,” Angelese whispered.
Cassie’s jaw dropped.
Man, these guys are HARDCORE.
The Grand Duke’s monstrous body remained standing, fully poised. An Usher picked up the head and held it out by the horns.
“I’ve done as you have bid, Etheress,” said the Grand Duke’s head.
“I hate to tell you this,” Cassie said, “but I was just kidding.”
“As I’ve said, your humble host awaits you, and someone else too, someone who loves you and yearns to see you—”
“Yeah, I know, my sister. But I don’t believe what devils say. I’m not that stupid, so why don’t you do us all a favor? Why don’t you and your goon squad hit the road?”
“Come with us of your own free will, or we will take you,” the Grand Duke said, and behind him, several of his beasts were unfolding a barbed net.
“You can’t take doodly-squat,” Cassie began, and then she shouted, “because you’re all BONELESS!”
The Grand Duke’s head went limp as a rubber sack, dangling. His erect body collapsed on itself, then every Usher in the hall seemed to deflate as all their bones disappeared from within their flesh. In the time it had taken Cassie to merely say the word, the Grand Duke and his platoon were transformed into a quivering mass of flesh.
“That’s so cool!” Angelese exclaimed.
But Cassie began to go weak-kneed. “God, I can barely move, I’m so tired all of a sudden.”
“Every time you use your powers, you drain your physical vitality, and you’ve used a lot today. But we’ve still got to get out of here. The Merge is wearing off, but I don’t know for sure how long it’ll take to end completely.”
Yes, Cassie thought, light-headed and squinting ahead.
Let’s just leave.
She looked at the cinderblock hallway, and thought:
Fall down
...
The corridor toppled like something made of a child’s blocks suddenly swept by an irate hand. Air gusted in their faces, dust billowed outward in waves, and where the walls had been was now just open night. The perimeter of the confines of the Merge dwindled before their eyes, hellish structures, streets, and features dissipating. Cassie had collapsed in psychic exhaustion. Angelese put her over her shoulder and began to run.
Part III
Fall
Chapter Eleven
(I)
Walter felt woozy, tunnel-visioned, as though he’d just stepped off a particularly vigorous roller coaster.
I’m in a city,
came the clipped thought. He tried to blink away some vertigo.
Just a big city, a run-down district, like southeast D.C. or maybe Detroit.
These thoughts were reactive, against the extreme disorientation. It would occur to him in a few moments, though, that neither southeast D.C. nor Detroit possessed a perpetual twilight of dark scarlet. The moon that overlooked D.C. and Detroit was not black, nor were the stars jaundice-yellow.
Walter staggered down the stinking alley. His head hurt, and with each throb of pain another dollop of memory returned. He put his hand to his head, felt the wrap of bandages, then remembered still more.
He’d tried to kill himself, but he’d failed. Colin, instead, had been the one to successfully complete the act.
He chuckled.
So ... I’m an Etherean. Either that or this is a really bad dream.
A cone of light from a leaning streetlamp bathed the end of the alley. There stood a pile of rubbish, as might be found in any city: an old metal barrel stuffed with junk. Amid empty cans and splintered furniture legs sat an oblong mirror webbed with cracks. Walter stared down at his image, watched himself unwrap the bandage from his head. His shoulders slumped at the geek reflection and the ludicrous wound. A shaved line of stitches parted his hair right down the middle.
Colin was right, I DO look like Moe in the episode about the organ grinder’s monkey
... What difference did it make, though? If this wasn’t a dream, then he was in Hell now, a Hell that had evolved over thousands of years into this endless metropolis full of skyscrapers. And he was unique in this place. In the Living World he’d been a nobody.