The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (22 page)

All right.

This is how Penelope died.

This is how I couldn’t save her.

Penelope and I toured the cities of Japan looking for the angels but we were unable to find a sign of even one of them. We didn’t carry the camera gear in public anymore. We didn’t want to attract any attention. Now that the Americans had started firebombing cities, people were growing suspicious of each other. That was always the way once your side started to lose. No one wanted to believe the enemy was simply better or more technologically advanced. Or worse, had God on their side. Like he’d ever taken sides.

We would have to leave soon if we didn’t find anything. I worried about Penelope’s safety here, and the safety of our unborn child. If anything happened to me, and I wasn’t able to maintain the sleight and people could see what she really looked like . . . I wondered if the postcards in Montparnasse had been another trap, to lead us away from the angels instead of to them. To lead us into harm’s way. I wondered if Penelope’s father was behind it.

We spent so much time in trains and graveyards that I lost track of what city we were in. We stopped at another European-style Christian church that was just as nondescript and generic as all the others in the country. There were no Notre Dames here, no Westminster Abbeys. There was just the Nagarekawa church. A small, humble structure for a small, humble sect.

We arrived there early in the morning. We were following our first possible hint of angels. A ticket agent at the train station had told me she’d heard the sounds of wings flapping over the city for two days even though the sky was empty. It wasn’t much—she may even have been mad—but it was something at least. I hoped the local priest would have more to offer us. I wanted to find Penelope’s father and kill him so we could leave Japan and head back to Europe, or maybe America. I just wanted to live with my family.

We went into the church and looked for someone else to question. There was only one other person inside, a priest who stood in the sanctuary, staring up at the stained glass windows. Penelope sat in one of the pews to rest while I went over to talk to him. She was already showing with Amelia, and it was growing harder for her to walk around.

“Pardon me, but I have an odd request,” I said as I approached the priest. I gambled on speaking English, because I still couldn’t manage enough Japanese to speak the words I wanted to ask him. “Have you heard the sounds of wings over the city lately?”

He didn’t turn to face me. He didn’t even look away from the windows.

“It is the sound of the angels gathering to witness the end,” he said.

I knew that voice. It was the same voice that had rung in my ears when I’d been born. When I’d died in the sands of the Colosseum. When the dragon had nearly taken me. I grabbed his arm and spun him around to face me.

He was a man I’d never seen before, just another man, and for a few seconds I thought I’d made a mistake. I thought perhaps I was imagining things. But then he changed before my eyes. His eyes turned black and his skin withered to that leathery corpse look. The priest’s robes hung on him like they would have hung on a skeleton now.

Judas.

“Hello, monkey,” he said, smiling. “It’s been a while.”

I moved on reflex, my body acting before my mind could. I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him down on the altar, so hard the wood cracked in two. So hard I would have crushed his throat if he were a normal man.

But he wasn’t a normal man. He was Judas.

I screamed at him, because it was the only sound I could make. It was a mix of rage and joy. I didn’t recognize the noise I made, but I must have asked him why he was here, because he told me.

“I am here to witness history,” he said. “To watch your kind wreak the kind of havoc I can only dream about.”

I didn’t let go of him, even when he started shifting his appearance in my grasp. He went from that simple man who had befriended Christ to the Roman soldier who’d gouged out my eyes. Then he became Commodus again. Then the priest from the Spanish Inquisition who’d burned all those villages and men of learning as I followed his trail across the land, then the merchant sailor who I’d chased through Greece after he brought the Black Death into Europe. He kept changing, becoming men and women I didn’t recognize, but who I had no doubt he had been at one point or another in human history.

“Your kind don’t even need me anymore,” he added. “You are your own destruction now.”

I grabbed a piece of the broken altar and ripped it free. I raised it over my head like a stake, ready to ram it through his heart, and he suddenly changed into Penelope.

I hesitated.

I shouldn’t have hesitated.

Because the world became undone in that second.

I looked over my shoulder to make sure Penelope was still there. She was, but she was on her feet again, halfway to Judas and me.

“Cross!” she said. I half expected her to ask what was going on, and for a second I considered how to answer that.

Instead, she said, “The baby.” And she held her stomach in a way that could only mean there was something wrong.

I looked back down at Judas again. Now he was me.

“Kill me and you’ll never have the answers you seek,” he said.

I thought about killing him anyway. About killing myself. I was a different man since Penelope had found me. Maybe it was time to put the past to rest. Maybe it was time to put all my questions to rest.

But the decision was made for me before I could choose.

All the stained glass windows suddenly shattered, and wind howled into the church. The air filled with the sounds of a mighty beating of wings, and Penelope’s cries and my own were lost in it. I threw myself to her, to protect her from whatever was happening. Her and Amelia.

I threw myself away from Judas with a curse of frustration.

I knew something bad was about to happen. If Judas was here, something very bad was about to happen.

“What is it?” I said to Penelope, holding her in my arms.

“I don’t know,” she said, looking down at her stomach. She was as pale as I’d ever seen her. “Amelia. Oh my God.”

But God wasn’t there to help us. There was only me.

I turned back to Judas, shielding her with my body.

“What have you done this time?” I screamed.

“I’ve done nothing,” he said. He continued to change as he stood. Now he was a Japanese man, a Japanese woman. They were all naked, their skin melted with burns.

“Your kind has done it on their own this time,” he said. “They have become the gods of death.” He laughed, but it wasn’t the kind of laugh that had any joy in it.

I pulled Penelope outside. There’d be time to deal with Judas later. Judas would always be there. Right now I had to get Penelope and Amelia away from whatever was about to happen.

But it was too late.

Outside, it was snowing. No, not snow. Pieces of paper. I caught one of them in my hand. A fragment of a postcard. A tree done in ink in the suibokuga style. One of the postcards we’d found back in the Montparnasse cemetery.

It was a trap. Japan was a trap. But I still didn’t understand what kind of trap.

“What is it?” Penelope cried, looking at the snow. And then she couldn’t speak at all when the angels started falling from the sky. They filled the air. Hundreds of them. No, thousands. It looked to be every angel left alive, although some of them were so ragged and skeletal I wasn’t sure they were alive. They were all in their heavenly incarnations—naked, winged men and women with swords and spears and axes that glowed or burned with fire or dripped the venom of older, dead gods. They landed on the roof of the church, and in the yard, perching on the fence and the water fountains and the trees. The earth and stone and wood under their feet smoked, and their wings formed little whirlwinds of fire in the air. They stared at us but didn’t say anything. If they were here for me, there were too many of them to defeat. But if they were here for me they would have attacked already. Which meant they were here for something else. And whatever else it was had to be something truly terrible to attract this many angels.

“It’s the end of an age,” Judas said, following us outside. He was still an ever-changing crowd of burned Japanese people.

“Why did you bring us here?” I asked him. I kept myself in between him and Penelope. I was still struggling to understand what he was up to.

“The child,” he said, and he became a young girl, then a young boy. Their bodies melted and covered in burns as well.

I spat on the ground between us. My rage was so powerful the ground caught fire where it hit.

“You will not harm my child or Penelope,” I said. “I will not allow it.”

“It is true I won’t harm them,” Judas said, looking up at the sky. “But that is meaningless. The child will fall to the same fate as the rest of us. It is as much an abomination as we are.”

“Cross,” Penelope said. “Who is he?”

But I had no way of answering that. Not really.

“She is a miracle,” I said to Judas instead.

“That’s what I just said,” he chuckled. He looked at the angels, then back at me. “She redeems you, doesn’t she?”

“They both redeem me,” I said. “Enough that I’m done with you now. I swear, and this is the only time I’ll make this offer, but I swear that I am done with you if you just leave us be.”

Judas looked at me, and for a moment there was only the sound of the angels’ wings. When he spoke next, his voice was almost a sigh.

“That’s why I’ve brought you here,” he said. “I cannot abide a redeemed Christ, or even the shell of Christ, any more than I can abide a redeemed humanity. For one day, you may give them hope again. You may give them peace once more. I cannot
allow
that.”

“We’re leaving,” I said and pulled Penelope toward the street. There were angels in our way, a pair of ebony giants with spears made of even darker bone. I didn’t recognize them at all. “We’ll take care of your father later,” I told Penelope, even though he was probably one of the crowd around us now. “We have all eternity to find him.” I didn’t add that I no longer cared if we found him. I just wanted to get her and Amelia away from there.

“We don’t,” Penelope said, looking around. “I don’t think we have any time left at all.” There were tears on her cheek as she laid a hand on my face.

“I won’t let you die,” I said. “Not when you’re with me.”

“Don’t,” she said, shaking her head. “Promise me.”

I stopped and looked down at her. I didn’t want to speak for fear of what she might say. But she said it anyway.

“Promise me that when I die you won’t bring me back to life,” she said.

I stared at her. “But we can have forever,” I said.

“I don’t want to be like him,” she said. “I want to be human.”

And there was nothing I could say to that. So instead I turned back to the angels.

“Get the hell out of our way,” I said to the ones holding the spears, and they stepped out of our path and bowed.

Too late. Far too late.

“Cross,” Penelope said, staring up at the sky. A lone plane flew high above the angels. The sun glinted on something falling from it. Something metallic. “Oh god,” she said.

It was too late to run. So I shielded her with my body as best as I could. And I prayed for the first time in many, many years. I prayed for protection. Not for me but for Penelope and Amelia.

“The gods are all gone,” Judas said, and now he was himself again. He looked to the sky, and for a moment he looked bent and weary with age, and very, very alone despite the crowd. “Only we remain,” he said.

And then the angels all screamed in unison, a terrible noise that tore the sky open, and then hell erupted all around us and through us.

And that was Hiroshima.

I drove out of Seattle and headed north for a couple of hours. I took a side road off the highway, then turned off that onto a dirt road, and turned off the dirt road onto a dirt trail. The car scraped along rocks and tree roots, and branches scraped the side of the car. Sut’s credit card was going to get a real workout with the rental agency. The trail ended at an abandoned farm. The same farm where Penelope had left her car so long ago. The roof of the house had collapsed and the fields were overgrown. A deer ran away at the sight of me. There were three leaning crosses in the yard now. I gave them a moment of silence, which is as close as I come to prayer these days, and then hiked into the woods.

I moved quicker now that I was on my own and not slowed by Penelope and her camera equipment. I reached the shack I’d shared with her as the sun was setting, turning the sky amber.

I hadn’t been back here since we’d left. I was surprised to find the place looked much the same as before, only now it was lost in the shrubs and young trees where there’d once been a clearing. A dead, fallen tree leaned against the roof, buckling it, but it hadn’t caved in yet.

Memories and longing welled up inside me and mingled as I approached the shack. I thought maybe the longing was for Penelope, until I opened the door and stepped through.

The inside looked the same as I remembered it too: the simple bed in the corner, the wooden plank on stones we used for a table still set with chipped cups, the clotheslines on the walls where Penelope had hung her photos. It should have been overrun with insects by now, everything rotted away, but it looked the same as the day we’d left it. That may have had something to do with the angel standing in the centre of the room.

He’d gone with the classic look: naked, feathered wings, radiant skin, flowing hair. I realized as soon as I saw him that the longing I felt was for his grace, not Penelope, and I cursed him even though I didn’t recognize him.

He put up his hands in peace, and I saw he was unarmed. For whatever that was worth.

“I am not your enemy,” the angel said. “I am Aigra. I am your salvation.”

“That’s funny,” I said. “I thought I was my own salvation.” I risked a glance over my shoulder, back outside, but I didn’t see anyone else. Which didn’t mean much, of course.

I searched my memory but his name meant nothing to me. He must have been a minor angel. Or he was lying. Or who knows?

“So, Aigra,” I said, “what are you doing here?”

“I am waiting,” he said. “As I have been for countless days and nights. Ever since you journeyed away from this sanctuary.” He looked around, then added, “I have preserved it for you.”

I considered him. Something I didn’t understand was going on here. In other words, business as normal. “What have you been waiting for?” I asked him.

“For you,” he said.

If he was here to ambush me, that would have been a good line to attack on. But he didn’t do anything, just dropped his hands back to his sides and watched me.

I shifted a little to the right, so I was no longer standing in the open doorway. Just in case anyone was sneaking up on me from behind.

“And what do you want with me?” I asked.

“I want nothing but to serve you, my lord,” he said. “I am here to offer myself to you.”

“That’s very generous,” I said, “but I’m not really interested in sidekicks.”

“You misunderstand me,” he said. “I mean I offer my grace to you.”

I’d met many angels in my time, and learned there were as many personality types among them as there were among people: there were the warlike ones and the scholarly types, the passionate ones and the cold, calculating ones. But I’d never before met a suicidal angel.

“If you were looking to kill yourself, you could have come found me a long time ago,” I said. “I haven’t exactly been hiding from your kind.”

“I am not seeking to simply kill myself,” he said. “I am here to provide you with aid. We have a common enemy, after all.”

“We?” I said.

“The Fallen,” he said. “Those of us who have been left here by God to fulfill the Plan.” I could tell from the way he pronounced things that he was capitalizing them. Everyone seemed to be capitalizing things these days.

“I hate to break it to you, but I don’t think there is a plan,” I said. “I think we’re all on our own now.”

“Have you become one of them then?” he asked, and he looked surprised. It was the first time his expression changed.

“One of who?” I asked.

“The Risen,” he said.

I sighed. “Look, I can’t keep track of your guys’ little cliques at the best of times,” I told him. “Just break down for me what’s going on and who the major actors are.”

Aigra blinked a couple of times and his wings spread a little. Then he nodded and folded his wings back in.

“There is a new war among the seraphim,” he said. “We are divided into camps.”

I waited. Nothing new there. The angels were always looking for reasons to get into fights with one another. Sometimes they made up, sometimes they found their own corner of the world or elsewhere to sulk and torture lost souls for eternity. Sometimes, apparently, they hid in abandoned shacks for decades.

“We started off all Fallen,” Aigra went on. “Those of us left behind when God hid himself. We waited patiently for his return, and we watched the events of the world but we did not act upon them. Like God, we remained outside of history. And at first our only debates were whether he would be wrathful or forgiving of his subjects when he came back. But then some grew impatient.”

I swear night fell in that instant. But I could still see thanks to Aigra’s glowing skin. “They ventured fantasies that God wouldn’t return, that he was gone forever for reasons we’d never know. They read us Nietzsche and Beckett and said these men were the new prophets. They said God had sundered the world with his absence. They said it was our job to repair it. They said it was time to intervene again.”

“Let me guess,” I said. “They became these Risen characters you mentioned. And I’m betting the name means they’re the type who want to get biblical on the world.”

Aigra nodded, once. “They want to recreate Heaven on earth. They seek to supplant God.” His wings flared out again. “They seek to supplant you.”

“Well, they can have my job,” I told him. “I quit a long time ago.”

“They are cleansing the world,” he went on.

“Cleansing it?” I asked. Yes, it was definitely darker now.

“Removing all those beings that never had a place in Heaven,” Aigra said. “The minotaurs, the sirens, the ones that must not be named. They slay those they cannot remove.”

“What do you mean remove them?” I asked. “Where are they taking them?”

He shrugged. “We don’t know. Those taken by the Risen are never seen again.”

I was beginning to get a bad feeling about this.

“They will not rest until the earth is naught but heaven and human,” Aigra said. “The seraphim and their subjects.”

Alice, I thought. The gorgons. The faerie. And all the others.

“It is not our duty to protect them,” Aigra said, as if reading my mind. “Nor could we if we chose such a path. The Risen have grown too strong.”

“What do you care what the Risen do?” I asked. “I would have thought such a world would suit you just fine.”

“It is obviously not God’s intention or he would have made it so,” Aigra said. “The Risen are perverting the Plan.”

“And I suppose you want my help in fighting them,” I said. I moved around to the wall that had served as our kitchen. Cups and plates still sat on a wooden shelf. I blew dust off them while looking for the knives I remembered to be here.

Aigra didn’t turn to follow me.

“You are our lord,” he said. “We will do as you desire.”

“I’m not who you think I am,” I said, automatically. There. A knife with a good-enough six-inch blade sitting on top of the old wood-burning stove.

“You are the closest we have to God,” Aigra said.

I sighed. Sometimes there’s just no talking to angels.

“And who have the Risen chosen to fill in for God?” I asked. “I’m guessing it’s not me, or I would have got the memo by now.” I picked up the knife and looked at it. The blade looked like it had been sharpened recently.

“They see you as a corruption that needs to be purged,” Aigra said. “They have elected one of their own to rule, another Lucifer.” He spat on the ground. “He has taken on a human name to express his supposed humility and devotion. His servitude. His name is Edwards. Jonathan Edwards.”

I leaned against the stove and studied Aigra’s back. It was all coming together. And yes, I had a very bad feeling about this. What had Cassiel involved me with?

Of course, Aigra being an angel, there was a distinct possibility he was lying to me.

“Tell me,” I said, “why didn’t you seek me out before this?”

“There was no point,” Aigra said. “We have had few dealings with you since the Resurrection, and little access to your heart and soul. We didn’t know if you would be interested in fighting against the Risen or with them. Or fighting for anything.”

That one stung a little, but only because it rang true.

“I volunteered to wait for you here after you left,” Aigra went on. “Because I believed you might come back in a time of need, when you would be willing to listen to my words. When my sacrifice would not be in vain.”

A thought occurred to me, and the knife grew light in my hand.

“How did you know about this place?” I asked.

“You grew careless when you were with her,” Aigra said. “We were able to watch you unnoticed. We discussed approaching you then, but we believed you would not have gone to war against the Risen when you were in love. You would not have willingly let go of that life. So we continued to wait and watch. We lost you for a time after the chaos of Hiroshima. That’s when I came here and readied myself for you. We have come across you from time to time since then, of course, but we kept our distance. You were much changed after that day, and your thoughts were writing in the dark to us. I remained here. I knew you would come in a time of need.”

I thought about the angels hidden away somewhere during all those moments I had with Penelope, and I grew still inside. “You’re going to have to wait a while longer,” I said. “I’m not going to kill you. And I’m not going to help you in your fight. I’ve got business of my own with Edwards, but it’s just business. I’m going to settle it on my terms, and it won’t have anything to do with you or the Risen or anything else. You and your plan can rot in hell with that other bunch of Fallen.”

Aigra didn’t say anything.

I meant what I said. I wanted his grace but I wasn’t desperate for it. I could walk away from here and leave him waiting for another hundred years. Only this time I wouldn’t come back. I’d make him long for me like I longed for Penelope.

I stuck the knife into the wall and started for the door, but he stopped me halfway across the room.

“We could have saved her,” he said.

I couldn’t help but look at him again.

“We saw her death,” he said. “We were there when it was made. When the mortals dreamed the dreams of seraphim and conceived the bomb. When they sent it on its way to you in that lonely plane. We were there when she died. We knew how much you loved her. We could have shielded her. We could have spirited her away from the fires, as a gift to you. We could have brought her back here for you.”

I didn’t say anything. What was there to say to that?

“We need you angry,” he said. “So we let her die.” He dropped to his knees. “We need you wrathful, so we let her die.”

I stared at him for a moment. He kept on looking ahead, out the door, at the stars that were beginning to show outside. Then I went back for the knife.

And I was wrathful. I was very wrathful.