The Fallen 03 - Warrior (26 page)

But the shower was heavenly, even if the shampoo came in a green tube that looked more like toothpaste. I soaped my body lavishly, then froze. Not all his tattoos had left me. There was a mark on my right hip, one I couldn’t begin to decipher. I scrubbed at it, but it didn’t fade, and it didn’t move, the way Michael’s did. Strange. I certainly wasn’t going to say anything to Michael about it. He’d probably done it on purpose, and he was waiting to see how long it would take me to mention it. He was going to have a long wait. I deliberately didn’t look down, not in the mood to see more dried blood go down the drain. When I finally climbed out of the huge pink tub and wrapped myself in fluffy pink towels, I felt almost human.

Which I wasn’t, I reminded myself, turning to stare at my reflection in the mirror. I was an immortal goddess with no powers. Whoopee.

The face that looked back at me was pale as always, my black hair such a mess I wondered if I’d ever tame it. There was a mark above my breast where I had cut myself. It had healed completely, but a thin red line marked the place where he’d put his mouth and drunk deeply. I shivered in reaction, not disgust but something else. Something deeper, more primal.

I pulled on the clothes quickly, not surprised by their perfect fit. Michael was wrong. This was
far too much like Sheol. I had little doubt I’d find exactly what I wanted to eat in that ghastly refrigerator.

I was wrong. No Diet Coke; instead there were small, heavy glass bottles of regular Coke, and it tasted even worse than the diet stuff.

There were saltines and cans of tomato soup, milk in glass bottles and bread the consistency of foam rubber. I looked at it all helplessly. I had never cooked in my life, and the stove scared me.

I certainly wasn’t going to let Michael know it. The can of soup came with directions, and the stove turned on easily enough, the concentric rings of the burner turning bright red. I poured milk into a saucepan along with the condensed soup, and began to stir with the only implement I could find, a wooden spoon.

It didn’t scorch too badly, and I poured some in a pink plastic bowl, only to see Michael watching me from the doorway.

He had taken a shower as well and his short hair was still damp and curly. He’d shaved, an interesting concept—I’d rather liked the stubble that had adorned his too-perfect face. He was wearing a twin to my T-shirt and a pair of baggy khakis. He looked like a man out of time. He looked delicious.

“The soup tastes better if you crumble the saltines into it, rather than have them on the side,” he observed, casting a surreptitious glance at the half-filled saucepan.

“Help yourself,” I said from my spot at the white metal table. “I left enough for you.”

He didn’t hesitate, though he frowned at the scorch mark at the bottom of the pan.

“Look, give me a break,” I said. “I’ve never cooked anything before.”

He opened one of the square packs of saltines and crushed them in his big hands, dropping them into his bowl and stirring until he ended up with a kind of brick-colored sludge. He took the seat opposite me, digging in with relish. “Never?” he said in disbelief.

“Never. I wasn’t allowed out of my room except to train. Of course, I watched years of Julia Child, but while I expect I could butterfly a leg of lamb or whip up a soufflé with a copper bowl and a balloon whisk, Julia never explained the intricacies of opening a can of soup.”

“Clearly I married the wrong woman,” he muttered beneath his breath.

I reached out to snatch the bowl away from him, but he was too fast, catching my arm before I went in for the kill.

“Your cooking is divine,” he said. “And just to prove it, I will generously offer to take your portion off your hands as well, since you’d rather fight with me than eat. My appetites are simple enough since I’ve fallen. Put food in front of me and I eat. Give me a beautiful woman and I’ll have her in bed in twenty-four hours.”

In a vain moment I hoped he meant me. I risked complete degradation and said, “It took more than forty-eight hours with me.” I waited for him to say something unkind, something crushing.

But for once he smiled at me, such a beautiful smile that my heart sank. Because I loved him, and a smile like that would bring me nothing but grief.

“You were worth the challenge.”

I let the words sink in. It was a lie—I had hardly been that interesting a bed partner, particularly to someone who’d explored the breadth and depth of sexuality that Rachel said he had.

I longed for him so badly, and I couldn’t have him. The best thing I could do was keep the atmosphere light. “Keep your hands off my tomato soup.” I reached for more saltines. He was right, they were delicious mashed into the soup. Who would have thought? “And tell me what your plan is. You do have a plan? You made this place sound like some kind of hell.”

“It is.” The smile had left his face.

“Hell is 1950s suburbia? I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. We’re just lucky you happened to find this place.”

“Lucky.” His expression was unreadable. “Have you looked outside?”

“Actually, no,” I said with surprise. I was usually more curious than that. I just happened to be far more interested in looking at him than at the landscape.

“Go to the window and tell me what you see,” he said in that voice I was coming to think of as the Archangel Voice.

But I wasn’t going to argue. I took the last bite of my cracker sludge and went over to the window. “Just a boring suburban street,” I said. “Half a dozen houses, all identical. Perfect lawns, no cars in the driveways, no sign of anybody.” I looked back at him, and he nodded, clearly not surprised. “So what happens next?”

For a long time he said nothing, and I wondered if we were back in the “I’m not giving you straight answers” mode.

Finally he spoke, almost reluctantly. “There’s a place here where the veil between this world and ours is very thin. We need to find that place, and with luck I can break through and fly us out of here before Uriel’s enforcer finds us.”

“He’s got an enforcer?” I said. As if we didn’t have enough challenges.

“Yes.”

We were back to monosyllables. “I thought no one knew anything about the Darkness. Come to think of it, Technicolor Suburbia Hell is a better name for it here.”

“Too unwieldy. And there’s more to the Darkness than suburbia.”

A sudden chill shot down my back. “How do you know that?”

But this time he wasn’t going to answer. “It won’t
be easy,” he said instead. “But it’s our only way out. If we’d stayed in the Dark City, Beloch would have found us no matter where we hid.”

“How?”

“Beloch can always find me.” His words were troubling. He glanced out the window. “We can’t risk going out now—it’s already starting to get dark. Time moves strangely here, and I have no idea how long the daylight will last. It could be a few hours or a few days, but we need to make sure we’re not stranded out in the dark. That’s when the Wraiths come. Assuming we get past the enforcer.”

“Oh, holy Christ, new monsters to deal with?” I had had enough. “Who the hell are the Wraiths?”

He was unimpressed by my temper. “Just what they sound like. The ghosts of creatures who’ve been sent here.”

I digested this. “And what do they do?”

“They suck the light from you, leaving only darkness, despair, and emptiness.”

“Just great,” I said. “And how do we avoid these Wraiths?”

“Keep in the sunlight and look out for shadows. They can’t survive in direct sunlight.”

“More vampire wannabes,” I grumbled.

“We’re not—”

“Yeah, yeah.” I dismissed him. “So how long before it gets back to full daylight?”

He shook his head. “Your guess is as good as mine. In the meantime, you ought to try to get some sleep.”

“I’m not tired. I don’t suppose this place comes with a nice old black-and-white television with
I Love Lucy
on it?”

“What’s
I Love Lucy
?”

I shook my head. “Never mind. I’ll find something to keep me busy. Maybe I’ll just sit around and try to annoy you.”

He just looked at me. “There’s no ‘try’ about it. And I could always strangle you.”

“No you couldn’t,” I shot back. “Because then you’d have to put your hands on me, and if you do we’ll end up having sex again, and that’s the last thing you want.” I held my breath, hoping, praying, he’d deny it.

He froze. “We’re not having sex again.”

I kept my face impassive. “Then don’t try to strangle me.”

For a long moment he said nothing. Then he pushed back from the table and picked up the empty bowls. “Go find your
I Love Lucy
,” he said. “And keep away from me. We’re stuck with each other until we get back to Sheol, and in the meantime I need to be alone.”

“Ditto,” I snapped.

I saw him blink at the word, then place it. “Ditto,” he agreed coldly. “Go.”

M
ICHAEL WATCHED HER GO
, the skirt swinging around her calves, her breasts moving softly beneath the T-shirt. Damn her. He was having a hard enough time not thinking about her, the taste of her skin, the taste of her blood.

He pushed the thought out of his mind. There was no longer anything keeping him from indulging in every carnal fantasy he’d ever had, but something held him back. He was going to have to watch her die, watch all that humor and vibrant energy be crushed, and he hated the thought. The closer he got to her, the worse it was going to be. He was already having a hard enough time trying to keep his emotions in check. He’d always thought he didn’t have any, but he was wrong. At least as far as Tory was concerned.

He glanced around at the plastic kitchen. It was a
stark reminder of who and what he had been. God’s enforcer. Which made him Uriel’s, delivering justice with a flaming sword, casting souls into the Darkness. Of course he knew more about the Darkness than anyone who’d been there. He was the only one who had ever returned.

The Fallen hadn’t even known of its existence until he’d been forced to join them, and he’d always been deliberately vague.

Once Uriel had cast him out, Metatron had probably taken his place. In the short time Metatron had been in Sheol, he’d managed to avoid any substantive conversations with Michael. They both knew the truly terrible things that had been their lot, and to speak of them would only make them more real. The question was, who had taken Metatron’s place? Who would be pursuing them through the bizarre worlds that populated the Darkness?

It had been his job to cast people into this. Those who had most displeased Uriel were sentenced to the Darkness, and Michael had brought them there. And if they’d managed to evade the Wraiths, he had come back and hunted them down.

He had always tried to believe that the people he’d hunted had deserved the horror of endless darkness. But Tory didn’t deserve it. Tory deserved light and love, joy and happiness and a long life.

Instead she’d gotten a fallen angel who didn’t know how to love and a death sentence. And there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

He pushed away from the table and headed toward the rectangle of light that Tory saw as a window. It looked as it always looked, a blur of colors that could coalesce into whatever vision of safety and comfort was most likely to lull the hapless quarry into a false sense of security. It made the payoff that much more devastating. And more fun for his previous taskmaster.

There was no question that Uriel took pleasure from the pain of those he punished. And no question that the crimes he’d punished could be relatively minor. Michael had wiped out entire villages, from newborn babies to ancient crones, as punishment for one man’s blasphemy, and he’d done so without question.

Questioning had caused his fall from grace. And questioning had caused the fall of the first angel, Lucifer, God’s favorite. Michael had been the one to fling Lucifer from heaven, and he’d never regretted it.

He pushed away from the window. Time was passing, much too swiftly. He knew from experience that time moved differently in the Darkness. For all he knew, Uriel would try to keep them there while he sent his armies to destroy Sheol. Michael had to get Tory out of there as quickly as possible.

Night came swiftly. For a moment he feared that Uriel’s sadistic mind had given them a false haven, that there would be no lights to keep the monsters at bay. But as the shadows grew longer and he could
see the glimmer of the transparent Wraiths waiting for them, the lights came on automatically. He wasn’t sure that was a good thing. If they didn’t control turning the lights on, then they had no control if something decided to turn things off.

He needed to stay near Tory in case that happened. He wasn’t sure what the outcome would be if he were to battle a Wraith. In truth, in the entirety of his existence, he’d never been truly tested by an adversary. He was the Sword of God, and even in a universe where God had disappeared, leaving everything up to a stand-in archangel and the doubtful conscience of mankind, he still held that place. Even Uriel couldn’t deny him that, though he could throw him out of heaven.