Walking in the Midst of Fire (5 page)

Remiel had grown temporarily disenchanted with the wearisome task of ministering to the dying, and believed that this might be just the kind of distraction that he required at that moment.

“Take me to your master,” he said, climbing up onto his mount. The flaming home behind him collapsed with an animal-like roar, tongues of angelic fire lapping eagerly at the damp, night air.

“Take me to Pope Tyranus.”

CHAPTER TWO

S
teven’s visit
had left Remy’s mind buzzing.

After his friend had decided to pack it in for the evening, he’d stayed on the roof for a while pondering the questions of an uncertain future.

His dreams warning of an impending war, and now the Vatican looking for him, made him very anxious indeed.

But what to do about it?

Remy downed the last of his scotch, not allowing himself to feel the effects of the alcohol. Marlowe was looking up from the floor where he lay.

“We should think about heading down,” Remy said, his mind still annoyingly abuzz.

“Yes,”
Marlowe agreed, in the voice of his species.

Remy stood, grabbed the nearly empty bottle of scotch and the two tumblers, and started for the doorway. Marlowe cut him off, zipping down the stairs in front of him to get inside first, his toenails clicking on the wood steps as he made his way down.

“Don’t make too much noise,” Remy warned the beast. “You don’t want to wake up Linda. You know what she’s like when you wake her up.”

Remy laughed as he heard Marlowe’s bark of a response.
“Monster!”

“Exactly,” Remy replied as they reached the first floor.

Most of the lights were off, but Remy had no problem moving around in the darkness. With just a thought, he could adjust the structure of his eyes, and see in the black as though the sun was coming in through the windows.

Marlowe drank sloppily from his bowl of water in the kitchen corner as Remy set the bottle on the counter and put the dirty glasses in the sink.

No matter how hard he tried to slow it down, his brain simply refused to cut him that slack. Something was brewing, and he knew that it likely had to do with the return of Lucifer to the prison dimension of Tartarus to remake it in his own image.

To turn it into Hell.

Remy had always feared something like this happening—the forces of God once again pitted against the Morningstar.

He needed to know what was happening; needed to know how close the impending disaster was, and how much danger the world of man would be in.

It was time to make a call.

He moved away from the sink and caught sight of Marlowe watching him from the corner, his shiny black coat blending with the shadows. The dog’s tail immediately started to wag.

“What?” Remy asked.

“What?”
the dog repeated in a throaty growl.

Remy was just about to ask him if he wanted to go for a ride, when suddenly they were no longer alone.

Linda sleepily rubbed at her eyes as she leaned against the kitchen doorframe. “What are you guys doing?” she asked, stifling a yawn.

Remy couldn’t help but stare at her. She was wearing the gray, extralarge
Walking Dead
T-shirt they had bought at Newbury Comics the week before and nothing else, her long, shapely legs looking even longer and shapelier than they usually did. Her hair was tousled, suggesting that she had been asleep for a bit. She ran her fingers through the long, dark locks, pushing them back from her face.

Though half-asleep, Linda smiled at him, and he felt that sudden flush of humanity that he had learned to appreciate so much.

“Want to fool around?” she asked, biting at her lower lip, her hair falling back over one half of her face.

She couldn’t have been sexier if she’d tried.

“What kind of a man do you take me for?” he asked, crossing his arms in mock indignation.

She padded toward him. “The kind that stands around in a dark kitchen with his dog, stinking of booze,” she said. She kissed him hard upon the lips, then pulled away.

“And tasting of booze, too,” she added, making a face.

She turned, heading back for the doorway, walking in such a way that he had no choice but to watch her. “If you have any interest at all in my offer, you know where I’ll be,” she called over her shoulder as she passed through the door into the room beyond.

“Huh.” Remy looked at Marlowe.

“Bed?”
Marlowe asked, his blocky head cocked to one side.

“Eventually,” Remy said. “A little playtime first.”

“Playtime?”
Marlowe repeated eagerly. He looked about the darkened kitchen for one of his toys.

“Sorry, pal. Not that kind of play.” He patted the dog’s head as he passed him. “People play.”

He heard Marlowe sigh pathetically behind him, and turned to see his friend sitting dejectedly, head low, in the darkened kitchen.

“I’ll tell you what. Once Linda and I are finished playing, I’ll take you out for a walk.” Remy told him.

The Labrador’s thick tail thumped furiously on the kitchen floor.

“Walk!”
Marlowe barked, his sadness suddenly forgotten.

Remy placed a finger to his lips, warning the dog to be quiet. “After playtime,” he assured the dog, starting toward the flight of stairs that would take him up to his bedroom. Once again, Marlowe rushed past to get there first.

“Stay off the bed!” Remy warned as the dog bounded up the stairs. The sound of Linda’s surprised scream, followed by hysterical laughter and a dog’s playful growl proved that the one obedience class they’d attended had certainly done the trick.

England
1301

Since being touched by the Nazarene, Simeon could not die.

It was not as if he hadn’t tried; it was just that death would not have him.

Even the passage of time could not harm him, the man looking just as flush with life as he had before he’d died so very long ago.

Plagued by the curse of immortality, he chose to wander, to experience everything that this world—now his prison—had to offer.

The good as well as the bad.

Simeon found himself drawn to the darker corners. Where the sane and rational mind might flee the terrors that hid in the shadows, the eternal man found himself moving toward them eagerly.

He was desperate to know what secrets they might share, how they might help him someday to see Heaven fall from the sky. Simeon had gathered much in the way of knowledge over the centuries he had lived and wandered, but it was the ways of sorcery and black magick that had proven the most useful.

The forever man had an aptitude for the black arts, and his hunger for this particular type of knowledge had become insatiable.

During his travels, as he sought out those in special circles who could teach him, there was one name often spoken in both reverence and great fear.

Some said he was only a legend, an amalgam of all the world’s greatest sorcerers and wizards, while others believed that he truly did exist, a living repository for all the magickal knowledge that had ever existed.

The name of the legend was Ignatius Hallow, and Simeon had traveled long and far to finally find him.

Standing on English soil, in the pouring rain, the forever man looked upon the ruins of the castle he had been directed to, and felt the beginnings of despair.

“How can this be?” he asked the foul elements, as he stumbled through the mud toward the ruins.

In a tavern in the town of York he had met an old man whose neck had been broken but he still managed to be alive. Those in the tavern whispered that this one was so insane that neither God nor the Devil wanted him, and they had sent him back to the world. They also said that the man with the twisted neck knew things—dark secrets that he would share for a price.

That had been good to know, for Simeon had need of such information.

By its appearance, the castle had been taken a long time ago, in some long-forgotten conflict that had caused its battlements to fall. There was not a sign of life to be found.

Simeon snarled as the realization that he’d been had began to sink in. He and the insane old man had made a deal: the first digit of his little finger from his right hand in exchange for the whereabouts of the legendary magick user. A bizarre price to pay, but it was what the man with the broken neck had demanded for his services. The madman had said that he could see the remnants of many years in Simeon’s eyes, which made him—as well as pieces of him—so very special.

The eternal man could still hear the old-timer’s cackle as he wondered aloud whether perhaps Simeon had been discarded by Heaven and Hell as he himself had been.

Simeon stared down at the bloody bandage wrapped around his hand. He could feel it throbbing with the angry beat of his heart as what had been cut away slowly, painfully, grew back.

Looking out over the ruins as he was assaulted by wind and rain, Simeon debated his next course of action. There was a part of him that wished to continue on his way, wandering to the next location, hoping for a piece of forbidden knowledge to add to his growing arsenal.

Or he could return to the tavern in York, for a piece of the twisted old man.

The wind pushed him even closer to what remained of the forgotten castle’s walls, as if the elements were urging him to be certain that the madman had indeed been wrong. He was about to step back, to prepare himself for the long trek to York, when the ground in front of him began to churn.

At first he believed it to be a trick of his eyes, the way the heavy rain pelted the muddy patches of exposed earth, but he quickly came to realize that wasn’t the case at all.

The vines, their bodies as fat as the thickest rope, and covered in large thorns that looked as though they could strip the flesh from his body, erupted from the saturated ground in a writhing tangle. Simeon managed to throw himself back, away from the thorn-covered tendrils, only to have another patch of the virulent growth explode from the ground behind him. Everywhere he looked the ground churned, and more of the serpentine vines grew, reaching for him, ensnaring him in their constricting embrace.

Simeon screamed as the thorns dug into his skin, tearing it through his garments. The tentacle-like growths held him tight, and began to squeeze the life from his body.

The more he struggled, the tighter the vines became, until his bones began to snap like pieces of dry wood.

Simeon’s screams filled the night, diminishing to little more than a pathetic whine as his blood flowed, watering the hellish vegetation. He was waiting for the inevitable death that would not hold, when through a darkened stone doorway in the ruins of the castle something appeared and began to move toward him.

The man was tall and of indiscriminate age, clad in robes that seemed to be cut from the fabric of night. He leaned on a staff as he slowly approached—a walking stick that appeared to have been carved from bone.

The figure stopped mere inches from him, and stared deeply into his eyes.

“You should be dead,” the magick user, Ignatius Hallow, said in a voice ripe with curiosity.

“That I should,” Simeon managed, though his throat was clogged with bile and blood.

“Why have you come?” the sorcerer asked.

Though it took all the strength that he had remaining, Simeon managed to answer.

“To . . . learn.”

And then he died, his body no longer able to sustain his life as a result of the abuse his fragile human form had endured.

But as before, death would not have him.

Now

“Do you like it?”

Simeon’s eyes were focused on the bare skin of a waitress’s arm, or more specifically, on the tattoo that curled its way around her pale flesh.

Thorny vines.

That was all it took to stir the memories of long ago.

He pulled his eyes from the tattoo to gaze up into the woman’s face. She was attractive in that used sort of way, the deep lines around her eyes and smiling mouth hinting at a hard life.

“Quite lovely,” Simeon told her, forcing a friendly smile. He didn’t want to be rude and draw attention to himself.

“I had it done when I was just a kid,” she said, taking his empty wineglass and placing it on her tray. “Wished I hadn’t as I got older, but now I think it’s kinda nice.”

She smiled again, as he agreed.

“You’re new in here, aren’t you?” she then asked, becoming more personal.

This was what he’d hoped against. Simeon had needed to get away by himself, away from the demonic trio that served him, even for just a single drink.

Methuselah’s was the best place he could think of. He’d always wanted to patronize the strange bar that catered to the most unusual clientele. And looking around, he was glad that he had.

A golem of stone wiped the surface of the bar with a damp rag, as a minotaur checked identification at the heavy wooden door. In one corner of the darkened establishment sat creatures more reptile than human, served by a waitress whose skin was nearly translucent, her internal workings on view for all to see. Four succubi that had followed a group of humanoid travelers down a hallway leading to the restrooms emerged from the darkened passage, dabbing at their mouths with lacy handkerchiefs.

Methuselah’s was a most fascinating place, and Simeon was glad he’d come, but he caught sight of what was coming through the door and knew it was time to leave.

He smiled again at the waitress, ignoring her question as he took some bills from his pocket and placed them on her tray. “Keep the change.”

“Next time you’re in,” the waitress said, eyeing the cash before slipping it into a pocket on her apron, “you be sure to ask for Katie.”

He stood up, staring at the three demons that had just entered the bar. Their eyes were shifting about the room. They were looking for him.

“I’ll be sure to do that, Katie,” Simeon told Katie, reaching out to take hold of her arm in a firm grip. “But I’m afraid that in a little bit you won’t even remember I’ve been here.”